Google confirms live demo of new AdWords redesign will happen on May 24

A new screen shot shows how ad scheduling data might be presented in the updated interface.

During Google’s annual Performance Summit this year, the company has announced, there will be a live demo of the overhaul of the AdWords interface that’s currently underway.

The most recent screen shot (above) shows an Ad Schedule window at the campaign level. It’s a bit hard to see, but the chart shows clicks by time of day for each day of the week when the ads are scheduled (excluded hours are in gray). More detail is provided in the table below.

Google teased the redesign at the end of March, explaining the goal of the new look, in part, is to provide an easier-to-navigate interface that translates across all devices. It is being built with Material Design, the design language Google uses for many of its consumer-facing apps like Gmail and Maps. The effort is being led by Paul Feng, AdWords product management director at Google. He has said the redesign process, including testing by big and small advertisers in multiple verticals, will take roughly 12 to 18 months.

source: http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-redesign-live-demo-may24-248837

Callout and Review extensions now available in Bing Ads

Advertisers can add the extensions at the campaign and ad group levels.

Bing Ads rolled out callout and review extensions last week. The new ad extensions are available in all Bing Ads markets, with the exceptions of Hong Kong and Taiwan. The ad shown above features both of these new extensions.

Callout extensions

Advertisers can add up to 20 callouts in their campaigns and ad groups and must have a minimum of two callout extensions for them to display.

One thing to note: Bing says the format in which callouts show can vary. In the ad above, there are actually two lines of callout extensions showing — one with dot separators (starts with “Free Cancellation”) and one with dash separators (starts with “The 20 best hotels in Chicago, IL”).

Review extensions

Reviews for review extensions must come from “reliable, well-established and trusted sources.” The review must appear on the review landing page — and advertisers are not charged for clicks on those links. The reviews can be paraphrased, but they must accurately represent the original review.

The ad above — with two lines of callouts and extended sitelinks — has a review extension enabled with a review from the World Travel Awards.

You can set up both of these from the ad extensions tab in the Bing Ads UI.

source: http://searchengineland.com/callout-review-extensions-now-available-bing-ads-248426

Google Shopping ads so hot right now: the meteoric rise of PLAs

For retailers, Product Listing Ads are the height of fashion! Columnist Andy Taylor explores the growth of this ad format and discusses how search advertisers can take advantage of this trend.

Google Product Listing Ads have been around quite a while, having rolled out to all US advertisers in 2011.

Since then, we’ve seen incredible growth of the format, which accounted for 43 percent of all retailers’ Google search ad clicks and 70 percent of non-brand clicks in Q1, according to my company’s latest Q1 Digital Marketing Report (registration required).

The vast majority of advertisers spend most of their time optimizing for non-brand search, since brand searches are typically navigational in nature for non-manufacturers and are mostly the product of other marketing efforts that drive brand awareness and demand.

As such, the game has changed for e-commerce advertisers, from one in which optimizing keyword lists, along with the ad copy and bids tied to them, came first and foremost, to one in which even managing keywords perfectly may only get an advertiser 30 percent of the non-brand pie.

The feed-driven ad model is here to stay, and many advertisers must shift focus away from text ads to optimize for those ad units driving the most growth.

Let’s take a look at some of the recent drivers of PLA traffic growth for advertisers, and wrap up with some of the key areas of account management that e-commerce advertisers must focus on given the growing importance of Google Shopping.

Mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile and mobile

There have been far too many “Year of Mobile” declarations, but when it comes to Product Listing Ads, this just might be it.

PLA phone spend and clicks grew incredibly in Q1, up 193 percent and 162 percent, respectively. PLA growth on desktop and tablet devices is solid, but it looks paltry in comparison.

There are a few factors helping to drive up PLA growth on mobile devices.

The first is the natural rise of mobile internet usage in general. More Americans own smartphones now than ever before, and that trend is only going to continue.

As long as mobile users are turning to the web for their search needs, Google ad traffic is going to grow on these devices, as Google is the default search engine for the vast majority of smartphone browsers in the US market.

Another, less organic accelerator of PLA growth recently is the significant increase in the size of PLA units on phones.

In July 2015, Google announced expandable Shopping Ads on phones, which would appear at the same size as prior to the update when first rendered on the SERP, but which would expand once a user interacted with the carousel.

However, just two months later, Google scrapped the expandable units and instead simply doubled the size of how the PLA unit appeared at all times. This resulted in PLA units dominating the above-the-fold real estate for many phone searches.

This increased real estate certainly helped PLAs to garner more clicks.

But Google didn’t just stop at upgrading the size of these ad units – it also appears they increased the frequency with which they appear on phone SERPs.

Beginning in July 2015, PLA impressions on Google.com began to grow significantly for phones.

During the busy holiday shopping season in November and December, PLA impressions naturally increased across all device types with increased search volume, but phones saw the most dramatic rise.

Looking at the first three months of 2016, PLA impressions are actually higher than even the busiest stretch of the holiday shopping season for phones. In March, PLA impressions on phones were up 174 percent year over year for the median advertiser.

All in all, it looks like Google has rapidly expanded the volume of searches that trigger PLAs on phones, and this in turn has paid massive dividends in terms of click and spend growth on the format.

Aside from showing bigger PLAs more often on its own SERP, Google has also recently begun using another tool in its arsenal to expand the reach of PLAs: search partners.

Search partners starting to account for a meaningful share of PLA traffic

Search partners have long accounted for only a tiny sliver of PLA traffic. But beginning in August of 2015, that share began to rise.

Driving this increase were two major changes:

• Google began showing PLAs in image searches, with this traffic classified as coming from search partners.
• Retailers such as Kohl’s and Target started to increasingly show PLAs on their sites.

While search partner traffic share has since come down from the highs observed in December, it’s been back on the rise over the past couple of months for all three device types.

As I talked about in this column, search partner PLA traffic performs at an almost identical cost per order as Google.com traffic for phones and tablets — the device types with the highest share of PLA traffic coming from partners. Thus, partner traffic has given many advertisers an efficient way of expanding their PLA programs.

So, what can advertisers do?

The conclusion here is that as far as e-commerce paid search optimization goes, Product Listing Ads need to be a priority — perhaps the priority.

That means:

• optimizing product feeds to meet and exceed all of Google’s requirements.
• keeping feeds up-to-date in terms of product selection, availability and pricing.
• structuring Shopping campaigns intelligently to bid products and manage negatives effectively.
• using negatives and campaign priorities to segment campaign traffic by query type, such as forcing all brand traffic to a single campaign to bid this traffic differently from non-brand traffic.
• using a smart bidding platform capable of bidding products and devices to efficiency targets.
• timely management of any feed errors or other advertising violations; a disapproved text ad/keyword might shut down some text ad spend, a disapproved feed will shut down your entire PLA program.
• Consistent search term report monitoring to inform negative keyword additions and guide structural campaign changes to help funnel queries to the most appropriate product groups with the most appropriate bids.

Failing to make PLAs a priority means failing to take advantage of the single biggest vehicle of paid search growth for e-commerce brands.

Keyword management is still important, but PLAs are the new black.

source: http://searchengineland.com/google-shopping-ads-so-hot-right-now-the-meteoric-rise-of-plas-248055

Top 9 reasons Google suspends local listings

Has your business listing in Google been suspended? Not sure what happened? Columnist Joy Hawkins discusses the likely causes and how to address them.

I see threads over at the Google My Business forum all the time from panicked business owners or SEOs who have logged into Google My Business to see a big red “Suspended” banner at the top of the page. The Google My Business guidelines have a very long list of things you shouldn’t do, but some offenses are much more serious than others.

Before I get into which rule violations lead to suspensions, it’s important to know the facts around suspensions.

Google won’t tell you why you got suspended

A Google employee will rarely tell you why your account got suspended.

Business owners often want Google to spell out what rule caused their suspension, but Google isn’t about to help rule-breakers get better at doing it and avoid consequences.

There are two different types of suspensions

The first type of suspension is what I refer to as a soft suspension. This is when you log in to Google My Business and see the “suspended” label and no longer have the ability to manage your listing. However, your listing still shows up on Google and Google Maps/Map Maker.

In this case, the listing has really just become unverified. Since you broke Google’s guidelines in some way, they have removed your ability to manage the listing, but the listing’s ranking is rarely impacted. I once worked with a locksmith who ranked first in a major metro area; even after his account got suspended, his ranking didn’t decline.

To fix this type of suspension, all you need to do is create a new Google account, re-verify the listing and stop breaking the rules.

The second type of suspension is what I call a hard suspension. This is very serious and means your entire listing has been removed from Google, including all the reviews and photos. When you pull up the record in Google Map Maker, it will say “removed.”

In this case, your only solution is to get Google to reinstate it; however, the chances of that are slim because this generally only happens when Google has decided the business listing is not eligible to be on Google Maps.

Following are the top nine reasons that Google suspends local listings:

1. Your website field contains a forwarding URL

I dealt with a case last year where I couldn’t figure out why the listing got suspended. Google was able to publicly confirm that it was because the website URL the business was using in Google My Business was actually a vanity URL that forwarded to a different domain.

As per the guidelines, “Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to landing pages.” This often results in a soft suspension.

2. You are adding extra keywords to your business name field

As per the guidelines: Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g., “Google Inc. – Mountain View Corporate Headquarters” instead of “Google”) by including marketing taglines, store codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions, or containment information (e.g., “Chase ATM in Duane Reade”) is not permitted.

This often results in a soft suspension, since the business is still eligible to be on Google Maps but just has a different real name.

3. You are a service-area business that didn’t hide your address

According to Google’s guidelines on service-area businesses, you should only show your address if customers show up at your business address. Whenever I’ve seen this, it was a hard suspension, since the listing was not eligible to show up on Google Maps based on the Map Maker guidelines.

It’s extremely vital for a business owner of a service-area business to verify their listing, since Google My Business allows them, but Map Maker does not. This means any non-verified listing that appears on Google Maps for a service-area business can get removed, and the reviews and photos will disappear along with it.

4. You have multiple verified listings for the same business

According to the guidelines: “Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts.”

Google will often suspend both listings (the real one and the duplicate you created) but will un-verify the legit one (soft suspension) and remove the duplicate (hard suspension).

5. Your business type is sensitive or not allowed on Google Plus

This one is new to me, but recently Google suspended (soft suspension) a gun shop and claimed the business type is not allowed on Google Plus. Since every verified listing is automatically on G+, the only option is for them is to have an unverified listing on Google Maps.

According to the Google Plus guidelines, regulated goods are allowed if they set a geographic and age restriction, so the jury is still out on whether Google will reinstate it or not.

6. You created a listing at a virtual office or mailbox

Google states: If your business rents a temporary, “virtual” office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours.

I often see businesses creating multiple listings at virtual offices because they want to rank in multiple towns and not just the city their office is actually located in. If Google catches them or someone reports it, the listings will get removed (hard suspension).

7. You created a listing for an online business without a physical storefront

The first rule for eligible businesses is that they must make in-person contact with customers. Since online businesses don’t do this, Google specifies that they are supposed to create a G+ brand page instead of a local page, which means they won’t rank in the 3-pack or on Google Maps.

I was once helping out a basket store in Ottawa on the Google My Business forum that creates custom gift baskets that you can order online. When I escalated it to Google to fix something, they unexpectedly removed her listing completely (hard suspension) because she ran an online store.

8. You run a service or class that operates in a building that you don’t own

For example, my church has an AA group that meets there weekly. They would not be eligible for a listing on Google Maps. According to the guidelines, “Ineligible businesses include: an ongoing service, class, or meeting at a location that you don’t own or have the authority to represent.”

9. You didn’t do anything wrong, but the industry you are in is cluttered with spam, so the spam filters are tighter

I commonly see this most often with locksmiths. I have run into several legitimate locksmiths who have had their listings suspended (hard suspensions, usually) because the spam filter accidentally took them down.

In this case, I would always suggest posting on the Google My Business forum so a Top Contributor can escalate the case to Google.

Conclusion

Has your listing been suspended for reasons I didn’t mention? Feel free to reach out to me or post on the forum and share your experience.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/top-9-reasons-google-suspends-local-listings-247394

Improve internal linking for SEO: Calculate Internal PageRank

Columnist Paul Shapiro shares his method for determining what pages on your site might be seen as authoritative by search engines, based on a metric he calls "internal PageRank."

Your site architecture — the way you structure and organize internal links (e.g., a link to the About Us section of your website from your main navigation) — plays a vital role in how both users and search engines are able to navigate your website, ultimately impacting your website’s rankings.

Modern search engines use links to crawl the web. The crawlers used by these search engines click on each link that appears on a page — both internal links and external links — and then all the links on each subsequent page, and so on. This allows the search engines to find your pages and rank them in their indices.

Search engines such as Google also use the number of links to rank query results, considering each link as a vote of importance for a page (i.e., PageRank).

For this reason, the way you link the pages on your website plays a big role in how search engines crawl, understand and rank your site. As an SEO practitioner, how do you make sure your site architecture is optimal and that internal links are organized correctly? Let’s explore how calculating a metric I call Internal PageRank can help us with this task.

Basic site architecture and navigation-based internal links

There are two basic types of internal links:

1. The internal links that form your site’s navigational structure
2. The secondary internal links that appear in context throughout your site (in articles and other places that aren’t necessarily a product of your site’s navigational structure)

Let’s look at the former. The first step to getting your internal links in order is to organize common navigation elements and adhere to a well-organized site structure. I recommend creating a classic internal linking structure and utilizing Bruce Clay’s silo architecture as a foundation for internal links. These are tried and tested, logical site structures that work. Here’s an example from Portent:

Now that your site has a solid foundation for internal links, let’s take a look at how these navigational links, as well as the internal links that exist in context, might impact how the search engines crawl and rank your pages. To look at the overall internal linking impact, we will examine the internal PageRank of all the pages.

What is PageRank?

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to discuss what PageRank is. PageRank is one of the algorithms that Google uses to rank web pages in their search results. It is named after Larry Page, one of the co-founders of the company.

The PageRank algorithm, put simply by Google, “works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is.”

Internal PageRank?

Google calculates PageRank for every page in its index, linking various pages within a site together, as well as linking other websites to those pages. But the idea behind PageRank — determining the importance of a page based on links from other pages — can be applied across a large network (like the one uncovered by Google’s crawler) or across a smaller subset of a network.

For the purpose of examining internal links, we will utilize the idea of PageRank to look at the relative importance of each page on a single website.

By “Internal PageRank,” I am referring not to Google’s PageRank algorithm, but to a similar calculation based on the internal links of a single website. Let’s get started and calculate Internal PageRank for your site.

Note: To be clear, I’m not talking about or advocating for PageRank sculpting. I’m talking about using a PageRank-like metric to diagnose any issues within your site architecture. This will become clearer when I run through an example.

Step 1: Crawl with Screaming Frog

Before we can actually calculate Internal PageRank, we need to crawl our website. For this example, I use Screaming Frog, as it is a standard tool in an SEO practitioner’s arsenal.

Start by launching Screaming Frog and crawling your website. When the crawl is finished, select Bulk Export > All Outlinks from the top menu, and save the CSV file to your desired location.

The CSV contains a list of all the internal links on your website. We will use this list to create a network and calculate Internal PageRank.

Step 2: Calculate Internal PageRank with R

If you’re not familiar with R, it’s a free software for statistical computing and graphics that runs on a wide variety of platforms. Download and install it, if you don’t already have it.

Install the igraph library by launching the R console and executing:

install.packages("igraph")

Once the library is installed, you will be able to use the following code in conjunction with the Screaming Frog crawl for your site:

	library("igraph")
	# Swap out path to your Screaming Frog All Outlink CSV. For Windows, remember to change backslashes to forward slashes.
	links <- read.csv("C:/Documents/screaming-frog-all-outlinks.csv", skip = 1) # CSV Path
	# This line of code is optional. It filters out JavaScript, CSS, and Images. Technically you should keep them in there.
	links <- subset(links, Type=="HREF") # Optional line. Filter.
	links <- subset(links, Follow=="true")
	links <- subset(links, select=c(Source,Destination))
	g <- graph.data.frame(links)
	pr <- page.rank(g, algo = "prpack", vids = V(g), directed = TRUE, damping = 0.85)
	values <- data.frame(pr$vector)
	values$names <- rownames(values)
	row.names(values) <- NULL
	values <- values[c(2,1)]
	names(values)[1] <- "url"
	names(values)[2] <- "pr"
	# Swap out 'domain' and 'com' to represent your website address.
	values <- values[grepl("https?:\\/\\/(.*\\.)?domain\\.com.*", values$url),] # Domain filter.
	# Replace with your desired filename for the output file.
	write.csv(values, file = "output-pagerank.csv") # Output file.

Simply follow the code comments (denoted by #) and don’t forget to:

1. Specify the path to your Screaming Frog CSV file.
2. Specify your domain and TLD extension.
3. Name your output file, which will contain the Internal PageRank of each individual page on your website.

Examples

Let’s run through a couple of examples on some real websites.

Catalyst Digital

Our agency, Catalyst Digital, recently relaunched our website after a rebrand, and we are still working out some of the kinks. So I decided to crawl the new site and examine its Internal PageRank.

Here is a sample of the output:

Looking at the site pages in terms of Internal PageRank, we see that our top page is our contact page. That doesn’t look right!

You wouldn’t be able to see this based on typical site crawl. For example, Screaming Frog indicates that the contact page actually has one link fewer than the home page, despite the higher Internal PageRank value. Internal PageRank, like Google’s PageRank algorithm, takes into account whichlinks are linking to that page in the network, rather than just the quantity of links.

There are fewer internal links to the contact page, despite a higher Internal PageRank value.

Now, let’s search for our brand name in Google:

Our Google search confirms we have a problem. Our agency’s contact page is ranking above our home page in organic results, likely due to how we have structured our internal page links.

Now that we are aware of this problem, we can take a look at our site architecture and start to craft a solution. Knowledge is power.

Online Geniuses

Let’s run a similar test on Online Geniuses, an internet marketing Slack community that I moderate, and see if anything comes up.

Here’s a sample of the output from R:

The website has a job board page that has a higher Internal PageRank value than our home page. It’s not causing a problem for us yet, likely due to the number of external links pointing to the home page and the difference in our keyword usage, but it’s probably something we should look into to maintain site integrity.

Conclusion

You should now have some sense of how you structure your internal links on your website. After you have established a basic structure for your navigation-based internal links, you can start to audit your site for internal linking issues by crawling your website and calculating Internal PageRank using R.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/improve-internal-linking-calculate-internal-pagerank-r-246883