Huge Changes Coming to AdWords & Other Top Stories from May

Search marketers the world over watched with baited breath last week as Google finally unveiled a whole raft of new features and improvements coming to the AdWords platform.

Although you could technically lump everything Google announced under the same banner, there was so much new information to digest, there was no way we could condense everything into one post (not that we’d want to). For this reason, the various changes coming to AdWords dominated the WordStream blog in May, so if you missed the big reveal and what it means for your campaigns, read on.

 

Of course, there was a bunch of other exciting stuff going on at the WordStream blog this month, but in light of Google’s epic announcement, we won’t be offended if you overlooked it – kind of like if a nifty new tool were released on the same day as Godzilla was sighted off the coast of Japan, for instance.

1. 5 Big Changes Coming to AdWords: Everything You Need to Know: This was the story in digital marketing this month. Google unveiled a host of new features that advertisers and marketers can expect to take advantage of as early as next year, including location-based ads in Google Maps and new responsive display ads. Larry was at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, for the announcement, and this detailed summary of the impending changes should be at the top of your reading list.

2. 5 Brilliant Competitive Advertising Strategies to Outsmart Your Competition: Some businesses shy away from directly competing with other companies in their space, favoring a less confrontational approach. However, as Larry explains in our second-most popular post from May, going straight for the throat can be a remarkably effective advertising strategy. Check out this post for five ways you can go after your competition – and win.

3. 7 Excel Tricks to Make You a Power User: Let’s face it – Excel will never be a “sexy” application. Although few people are impressed by pivot tables and other Excel features, that’s not to say they’re not incredibly powerful. In this post, Larry highlights seven cool tricks you can use to level up your Excel skills.

4. Google Expanded Text Ads: 10 Things You Need to Know: Last week, Google announced the biggest change to its text-based PPC ads we’ve seen in 15 years – but what’s going on? Find out in our fourth-most popular post of the month, in which WordStream’s Fearless Leader Larry Kim highlights what you can expect from Google’s newly expanded text-ad format, and how you can leverage these new features for maximum gain.

5. Why You NEED to Raise Organic CTRs (And How to Do It): In the world of PPC, most marketers are primarily concerned with the CTRs of their paid campaigns, an understandable position. However, if you’ve been neglecting your organic CTRs, you could be in big trouble. Larry drops some knowledge in this post about why you need to start focusing on your organic CTRs, too – right now.

6. 3 Landing Page Optimization Myths EXPOSED: Conversion rate optimization is arguably the hottest trend in digital marketing since content. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad information out there, including some stubbornly persistent myths and misconceptions about what landing pages should be and do in the first place. In our sixth-most popular post of May, yours truly debunks three of the most common landing page myths, and offers several suggestions on what to focus on instead.

7. Easy AdWords Bidding Strategies for Newbies and Math Haters: Getting started with AdWords is easy. Grasping complicated bidding strategies is another matter entirely. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a doctoral candidate in applied computational mathematics to start leveraging the power of AdWords’ bidding options, as Erin expertly demonstrates in this post. Essential reading for those hoping to exert more power and control over their campaigns.

8. These Coding Skills Will Make Every PPC Specialist More Valuable: These days, it seems like everybody’s learning to code. Even if you don’t know a string from an array, or couldn’t declare a function in JavaScript if your life depended on it, you can still learn fundamental coding skills that will make you considerably more valuable to employers and clients as a PPC specialist. In this post, guest author Frederik Hyldig of Denmark’s s360 agency shows you how to do just that.

9. 7 Totally Underrated Free AdWords Tools: You could be forgiven for thinking that you don’t need any more free tools to help you manage your PPC workflows. While you might be right, these seven free AdWords tools are seriously underrated, and Erin shows us why in this post. You never know, you may just find the tool that could save you hours of time.

10. 9 Easy Ways to Improve Your Marketing Resume: Looking for a job in marketing? Have you optimized your resume? No, I’m not kidding. In our final post of this month’s round-up, Elisa explains why you should absolutely include keywords in your resume (yes, really), why listing Microsoft Office “skills” is a waste of space, and other great tips to help your resume stand out from the crowd. A must-read for new and experienced marketers alike.

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Does Google look at anchor text in internal links?

Internal linking is a key SEO tactic, one which allows websites to send clear signals to Google on the relative importance of various pages.

It also works from a user experience perspective, helping visitors find pages that are relevant or potentially useful to them.

It’s something I place great importance on as an editor, as it’s one part of SEO that I can control, and I’ve seen the benefits for sites I’ve worked on.

Internal linking: examples

Let’s take an example from Search Engine Watch. I wrote this article on internal linking, with examples and tips, back in September 2015.

I’ve since linked to it using that exact anchor text (and variations on it) on at least 10 occasions. Essentially, I’m telling Google that this is the page I want Search Engine Watch to rank for that term.

As we can see, it’s worked well. Third on Google, and first for related terms (internal linking best practice for example).

Then there’s Mail Online. The most visited English language newspaper on the web had a relatively haphazard approach to internal linking until recently.

For common, high traffic terms (world leader’s names, celebrities etc) would be used regularly in articles.

The result was that each article would end up competing against previous articles for the same keyword or phrase.

The chart below shows its rankings for ‘David Cameron’ over a six month period. 80 different URLs were returned from the Mail for that search, but it didn’t rank consisitently for the term.

The answer was a consistent internal linking and hub page strategy. Mail Online created hub pages for common terms and consistently linked to them.

The result is a more consistent ranking from November 2015 onwards, when the changes were implemented.

There have been some fluctuations, perhaps due to inconsistent implementation of the linking strategy, but the page is performing much more effectively. As a result, the site will pick up more traffic for that term. Applied across the whole site, this can make a big difference.

Does Google count anchor text in internal links?

This is the question Shaun Anderson from Hobo Web sought to answer recently.

In the examples above, the pages targeted with internal links all contain the keywords used in the anchor text. So, Google could be using the content of the page, and the fact that several pages link to it to decide on the ranking.

In other words, this doesn’t prove that Google is taking note of the anchor text when choosing to rank a particular page.

So, Shaun set up a test. He added an internal link to one page on his site using the target keyword as anchor text.

It’s important to note that the target page did not contain the keyword used, so the only signal that it was relevant to said keyword was the anchor text on the link.

As we can see from the chart, a number of days after the test was implemented, the page ranked for the target term. When it was removed, the page dropped again.

As that page had no other relevance to the term other than the link, the anchor text appears to be the only reason for the page’s ranking.

It’s worth reading Shaun’s blog post for more detail, and for further variations on the test, but the indications are that the answer to the question in the headline here is yes.

It would be good to see other tests to back up this with more evidence. In fact, I’ll see if I can devise one on this site along similar lines.

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The most expensive 100 Google Adwords keywords in the US

Google is on track to make more than $70bn in revenue in 2016, and the lion’s share of that number will be generated by its insanely successful advertising business.

As I’m sure you know, advertisers pay a fee every time somebody clicks on a link in one of their ads. Some of the costs per click being paid are absolutely staggering, though they must be worth it, from the advertiser’s perspective.

Last month I analysed a large chunk of Google Adwords data from SEMrush to discover the most expensive keywords in the UK. Today, I’m releasing the same research for the US. The old adage suggests that everything is bigger in the States, and that certainly seems to apply to advertising expenditure.

So, here are the top 100 terms, based on a massive dataset of 80m keywords…

As you can see, the legal sector dominates, with the most expensive term closing in on a truly incredible $1,000 per click. It sounds insane, but consider that the average mesothelioma settlement is in excess of $1m and it starts to make a lot of sense. Legal terms account for 78% of the top 100, and nine of the top 10.

Water damage is another big ticket item, with clicks costing more than $250 for the top terms. Repair costs and associated claims for water damage into the tens of thousands, so again, it figures.

The other sectors that need to spend big to make an impression include Finance (largely focused on insurance), B2B (typically around the provision of business telephony) and Health (the top terms being linked to rehab).

One of the most obvious difference between the UK and US research is the total absence of any terms related to gambling in the latter country, where it remains illegal to gamble online. Gambling terms account for 77% of the UK’s top 100 terms, with the most expensive cost per click coming in at around $220.

The other thing is the lack of typos. In the UK advertisers are quite happy to seek out people who cannot spell, something that makes the eyes narrow when those terms are linked to gambling.

Sector by sector

Here’s a sector-specific breakdown of the top five most expensive terms in the US. Note that I’ve adjusted the scale for each one, such is the variance in click costs between industries.

You can share these charts individually, should you wish to do so.

As Google continues to turn the screw towards a fully fledged pay-to-play model my bet is that we’ll see even more keyword inflation over the next few years, though ultimately there may be a point at which things start to plateau.

What do you think? Are you surprised by the amount being spent by advertisers? Do leave a comment below…

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3 Ways to Increase Conversions (Without a Single A/B Test)

Small changes often equal small gains.

That was just one of the many conversion truth-bombs Larry dropped in his popular post “Everything You Know About Conversion Rate Optimization Rate is Wrong.”

Sure, switching your landing page’s button from orange to green might help. A bit.

However, data shows that small improvements from small changes often regress back to the mean over time.

So while those initial results seem promising, many times they’re short lived.

Instead, the unicorns – the accounts regularly topping 10% conversion rates – are playing a different game altogether.

What do the unicorns to increase conversions do that you currently don’t? Here are the three top areas to focus on – none of which involve changing your button color or other small-time A/B tests.

1. Upgrade Your Offer

Free trials, discount coupons, and free consultations. Three things your site probably has in common with every other product, ecommerce, and service website out there.

That’s an issue, because Point #1 in Larry’s article was: “Across all of the high-performing landing pages, we saw massively creative and differentiated offers.”

It’s fair to say that if your core offer is generalized and cliché, it literally doesn’t matter what the landing page even looks like. There’s no compelling value proposition to get strangers to buy-in.

Instead, you need a differentiated offer to build everything else around.

That was the genesis for the AdWords Performance Grader.

 

Marketing graders and other calculator-like offers are commonplace now in the marketing industry. They work because they give people:

• A quick, painless audit of their current performance
• Benchmarking data to see how they compare with others
• A personalized action plan with recommendations to improve performance

In short, they do all of the hard work and provide prospects with an immediate solution to a problem. In exchange, the company gets some basic user data to begin nurturing each lead over time.

Another great example (brought to my attention from this post by Brian Sun) is Lowe’s Lawn Care Plan.

 

This interactive feature helps people plan out their lawn (you know, city folk, those things with dirt and grass in them) based on their desired style, even factoring in your local climate (which also nets Lowe’s your zip code).

After answering a few very basic questions, the result offers users instant answers, and a customized, step-by-step roadmap to follow for improving the quality of their lawn.

They also include a GINORMOUS purple email subscription call-to-action at the bottom of the page to encourage people to sign-up for reminders.

 

In both cases, these interactive tools are focused on the primary problem or pain point people are experiencing first. They’re using that compelling hook to get your attention, before building a little interest and eventually showing how their products or services can fix said problem.

This final example is completely different, and focuses on large-scale, industrial real estate transactions. But the overall objective is the same.

When new companies are opening or moving warehouses (for product storage), they’re primarily concerned with availability and cost when searching for vendors. Things that take too long, or cost too much, threaten to throw their project timeline off the rails or kill their budget.

So when my company worked with United Material Handling to revamp their website, we wanted to bring their internal inventory system to the forefront of the site, allowing customers to browse their product line and get this feedback instantly.

 

Customers can simply select a Part Type and the Condition (New or Used) they’re looking for to get results. For example, if they selected Carton Flow and Used, here’s what they’d see next:

 

Here are the results they get:

1. Sizing: Users can scroll through the exact sizing they’re looking for.
2. Quantity: They can enter their desired quantity, and we also show how much of a given product is currently in-stock and ready to ship.
3. Price Estimate: We then give users a rough pricing estimate based on the selected product type, condition, size and quantity. 

If it all looks good, they can immediately “submit” this information to the company for an official quote (or keep browsing, similar to an ecommerce experience).

Even though the execution and context is different, the goal is the same:

Find out what’s most important to customers (based on their biggest pain points) and figure out a way to give them a sample solution (which leads to your products or services).

2. Analyze Your Conversion Flows

If your offer is good, you should have something compelling to share, promote, and drive new leads at a faster pace.

That flywheel momentum leads us to the next step:

“Identify the obstacles keeping prospects from converting and get those roadblocks out of the way by changing the flow. Test different variations to find out exactly which path to conversion works best for your audience.”

Friction is an important concept to keep in mind when trying to increase conversions. Generally speaking, less is more; as in, the fewer steps, fields, or pages required prior to a transaction, the better.

For example, instead of making people click through your Shop and Product pages before adding their desired widget to a cart, you can bring these most popular items to your homepage and eliminate a few unnecessary steps.

 

Marketing Experiments tested and proved this theory, first looking at what happens when customers need to go through seven (!) different steps before signing up for a subscription.

The results, predictably, were abysmal.

Zero registrations. And only a tiny fraction (1.88%) of the audience even bothered to begin this lengthy sign-up process.

Next, they tried reducing this down to four (and later three) stages to see if it improved conversions across the board.

 

The result? Simply changing from four steps to three (so reducing one page) resulted in a conversion increase of 32.35% (or 0.34% to 0.45%).

BUT…

There’s always a but.

Introducing more friction isn’t always bad. Sometimes, it’s desirable.

For example, Moz has found that their most profitable customers are ones who visit their site at  least eight (!) times. These users tend to stick around longer, while those that convert quickly also don’t have the time, patience, or understanding to use Moz’s tools, and churn quickly.

This is dependent entirely on your business, and should be tested thoroughly (probably much earlier than any simple landing page A/B test).

If you zoom in a little bit to individual pages in this “conversion flow,” there are other things that can (and do) affect success.

Ideally, you want to give people an idea or indication of where they’re at in the conversion flow and what it’s going to take to get them over the finish line.

You can do this explicitly, like Amazon does with their checkout page (which also condenses important steps like Shipping and Billing into one final page).

 

You can also do this subtly, providing visual cues to help people figure out where they are, and where they should go to finish.

 

Along the way, bottlenecks or problems can pop up and throw people off their tracks. For example, this lightbox feature pops up on one site BEFORE you can even add something to your cart.

While legally prudent, the nature of the strong warnings and language here – at this first step! – will undoubtedly make a few people second guess their decision.

However if you located this step last, AFTER adding to cart but BEFORE purchasing, it probably wouldn’t have such a potentially damaging effect. 

3. Implement Remarketing!

One thing you can almost guarantee is that NOBODY is looking at your display ads.

86% of consumers today are banner blind.

As is always the case, you don’t beat grim stats like that with more ads, but better ones. Ads that are more relevant, more personal, and better timed: Like remarketing ads.

Three out of five people notice these ads. Previously dismal ad responses can raise 400%. Even Larry agrees:

“Use remarketing to recapture [the 98% of] people who showed intent but didn’t convert.”

Larry went on to present this information at Inbound a few years ago, highlighting how ad fatigue affects remarketing much less over time.

Using Google’s Customer Journey to Online Purchase tool, you can even see how (and where) remarketing display ads can influence purchases in your industry.

For example, you can see how remarketing display ads for small beauty and fitness ecommerce businesses influence customer purchases – specifically, AFTER they have the chance to discover and become familiar with the brand’s products.

 

Otherwise, start with one of these common remarketing audiences, scenarios that apply to most industries:

1. New Recent Visitors: New visitors to your site who bounce, but might be interested in a related content piece that helps them become aware of the need for a product or service like yours.
2. Product/Service Viewed (or Added to Cart) But Not Purchased: These people have shown a little interest, but aren’t quite ready to convert just yet. (Here are a few more ways to combat cart abandonment.)
3. Upsells to Recent Purchases: Now that you’ve got a new customer, introduce them to additional products or services that could enhance the core offering they purchased.

The second audience above, where a prospect shows intent but doesn’t purchase, is especially interesting. You know they’re beginning to check out and evaluate your offerings, but aren’t quite sold for one reason or another (or simply aren’t ready to be sold just yet). The opportunity in this segment of people can be HUGE.

Introducing a lesser commitment for people who aren’t yet ready to buy (for whatever reason), can be a great way to widen your funnel and increase future conversions through better lead nurturing.

Remarketing can help recapture these people (who would otherwise bounce) by delivering that “lesser” offer (like the ones listed above in Section #1).

A simple change like this can result in huge cost-per-click improvements, too. In one case, we saw switching the messaging and offering for remarketing ads reduced CPC’s by 62%.

 

Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads are like a cross between Google Shopping Campaigns and remarketing, giving you the power of increased relevancy and scale. You set up a product feed (similar to Google Shopping) that will be used to power your Dynamic Product Ads database.

 

(image source)

An ad template can be then set up to help you dynamically pull this data in and tailor each retargeted Facebook ad depending on those specific products viewed on your site.

 

(image source)

The result?

Better relevancy, timing, and personalization. The key ingredients to combating (and defeating) banner blindness.

For example, The Honest Company saw 34% CTR increase and a 38% drop in cost-per-conversion using this new remarketing feature (compared with standard Facebook ad costs).

The Real Way to Increase Conversions

Most conversion rates hover around 2%, but the outliers – the unicorns regularly topping 10% – aren’t simply switching out button colors.

They’re focused on BIG changes, because they know small ones typically only yield small gains.

Instead of sticking to the same generic offer, they’re testing multiple offers that target customer pain points and problems.

Instead of focusing on a single landing page, they’re obsessing over how changes to their entire conversion flow affect profits.

Instead of giving prospects only one change to convert, they’re employing remarketing ads to bring people back into the fold and deliver more relevant, personal ads at the exact right time.

Sure, a simple A/B test could give you good results. But most don’t.

These bigger tips might require more time and effort, but it’s worth it when you see the increase in conversions.

Find out how you’re REALLY doing in AdWords!

Watch the video below on our Free AdWords Grader:

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Visit the AdWords Grader.

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The continuing rise of voice search and how you can adapt to it

Google’s I/O developer conference brought several huge announcements about Google’s future direction and projects, including two new technologies which demonstrate just how important voice search and natural language processing are to the company’s future development.

The first, Google Assistant, is a voice-activated digital assistant which builds on “all [Google’s] years of investment in deeply understanding users’ questions”, as Google’s blog declared. It takes Google’s voice search and natural language capabilities to the next level, while also allowing users to carry out everyday tasks like booking cinema tickets or restaurant reservations.

The second is Google Home, Google’s long-awaited smart home hub to rival the Amazon Echo, which comes with Assistant built in. Google Home – which will be “unmatched in far-field voice recognition”, according to VP of Product Management Mario Quieroz – will give users access to Google’s powerful search capabilities in answering their questions as well as linking together smart devices all over their home.

It’s no surprise that Google is focusing heavily on voice search and natural language going forward when you consider that in 2015 alone, voice search rose from “statistical zero” to make up 10% of all searches globally, according to Timothy Tuttle of the voice interface specialist MindMeld. That’s an estimated 50 billion searches per month.

Indeed, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed in his keynote speech at I/O that 1 in every 5 searches made with the Google Android app in the US is a voice query. Bing produced a similar statistic earlier this month when it announced that a quarter of all searches on the Windows 10 taskbar using Bing are voice searches. And statistics like these are only like to increase further as search engines, apps and developers respond to this trend.

Digital assistants: The agents of voice search

Siri. Cortana. Google Now. Alexa. Google Assistant. These are only the names of the most well-known digital assistants from the major technology companies; a search for “digital assistant” on the iOS or Android app store shows just how many different varieties of these voice-controlled AIs there are.

Digital assistants are overwhelmingly the medium through which we interact with voice search and carry out natural language queries, so it makes sense that they, too, are on the rise as companies compete for the biggest share of this rapidly expanding market.

The figures show just how recent much of this uptake of voice search is. Late last year, MindMeld published a study of smartphone users in the U.S. and their use of voice search and voice commands. It found that 60% of smartphone users who used voice search had begun using it within the past year, with 41% of survey respondents having only begun to use voice search in the past 6 months.

Image: MindMeld

With that said, digital assistants are not just confined to smartphones any more, increasingly integrated into devices like smart home hubs and game consoles. And the more that we speak to and interact with assistants, pushing the limits of what they’re capable of, the more sophisticated they become.

The newest generation of digital assistants, including Google Assistant and Viv, a new AI from the creators of Siri, are capable of interpreting and responding to long, multi-part and highly specific queries. For example, during a public demonstration in New York, Viv showed off its ability to accurately respond to queries like, “Was it raining in Seattle three Thursdays ago?” and “Will it be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5PM the day after tomorrow?”

At the demonstration of Google Assistant at Google’s I/O conference, Sundar Pichai made much of the fact that you can pose follow-up queries to Assistant without needing to restate context. That is, you can ask a question like, “Who directed the Revenant?” and then follow up by saying, “Show me his awards,” and Assistant will know that you are still referring to director Alejandro Iñárritu in the second query. (It’s worth noting, though, that Bing’s web search has been able to do this for a while).

Continuing the conversation: Google’s Assistant can now handle follow-up questions to a previous query without needing to hear the subject again

How voice queries are changing search

So how is this upswing in voice queries and technology’s increasing ability to respond to them changing the way that users search?

We don’t search with voice the same way that we search with a keyboard. Computer users have evolved a specific set of habits and expectations for web search based on its limitations and capabilities. So we would start off by typing a quite generalised, keyword-based search query like “SEO tips”, see what comes back, and progressively narrow down through trial and error with longer search terms like “SEO tips for m-commerce” or “SEO tips for beginners”.

Or if we were looking to buy a pair of red shoes, we might search for “red shoes” and then navigate to a specific website, browse through their shoes and use the site interface to narrow down by style, size and designer.

Whereas now, with the advanced capabilities of search engines to understand longer, more specialised searches and the advent of voice search making natural language queries more common, we might start off by searching, “Quick SEO tips for complete beginners”, or, “Show me wide-fit ladies’ red shoes for under £50.”

We search differently with a keyboard to the way we search with voice

The increasing rise of voice search brings with it a wealth of new data on user intent, habits and preferences. From the first query about SEO, a site owner can see that the searcher is not just a novice but a complete novice, and is not looking to spend a lot of time researching in-depth SEO guides; they want a list that’s easy to digest and quick to implement.

From the second query, a shop owner can tell exactly what type of shoes the consumer is looking for, down to the fit and colour. The price range indicates a budget and an intent to buy.

When mobile users are conducting voice search with location enabled, site owners and business owners can also gain valuable location data. Often, the voice query will contain the important phrase “near me”, which shows that the searcher is looking for local businesses. Mobile voice searches are three times more likely to be local than text, so optimising for local search and mobile will also help you to rank for many voice searches.

With the growth of voice search, we can expect to see more and more long-tail search keywords and natural language queries, which give increasing amounts of contextual information and useful data about searcher intent. The addition of voice assistants to smart home hubs like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home (Apple is also reported to be developing its own smart hub with Siri built in) will also give the companies behind them access to untold amounts of data on users’ daily life and habits, purchases, interests and more, opening up new avenues for marketing.

How can you capitalise on voice search?

With all of that in mind, what practical things can website owners do to take advantage of this new search frontier?

Look out for natural language queries in your site analytics

At the moment, there’s no way to tell outright which users are reaching your site through voice search, though Google is rumoured to be developing this feature for Google Analytics. But by looking out for natural language queries in your search traffic reports, you can start to get a feel for what users might be asking to find your site, learn from it and use it to inform your SEO strategy.

Think about how people are likely to phrase queries aloud

We need to start moving our approach from thinking of endless variations on different keywords to thinking about different types of questions and phrases that users might search. Ask yourself which questions might bring a user to your site, and how they will speak them aloud. What are the extra words, the ones that wouldn’t appear in a regular keyword search, and what information do they give you about the user’s intent on your site?

Make sure your site is set up to answer searchers’ questions

Once you’ve considered the types of questions a user might be asking, consider whether your site will satisfy those queries. Rob Kerry, in a presentation on the future of search at Ayima Insights, advised website owners to start integrating Q&A-style content into their sites in order to rank better for natural language searches and better satisfy the needs of users who are asking those questions.

Q&A-style content can also be excellent material for featured snippets, which is another great way to gain visibility on the search results page.

Develop content with a conversational tone

Because natural language queries reflect the way that people speak, they aren’t just longer but more colloquial. So consider if there are ways that you can create and incorporate content with a more conversational tone, to match this.

Use voice search!

One of the best ways to understand voice search, how it works and what kind of results it returns is to use it yourself. Search the questions you think might bring people to your site and see what currently ranks top, to get a sense of what works for others. Are there questions that aren’t being addressed, or answered very well? You can take this into account when creating content that is geared towards voice search.

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Title Tag Length Guidelines: 2016 Edition

Posted by Dr-Pete

For the past couple of weeks, Google has been testing a major change to the width of the left-hand column, expanding containers from 512 pixels to 600 (a 17% increase). Along with this change, Google has increased the available length of result titles:

This naturally begs the question — how many characters can we fit into a display title now? When Google redesigned SERPs in 2014, I recommended a limit of 55 characters. Does a 17% bigger container mean we’ve got 9 more characters to work with?

Not so fast, my friend…

This is where things get messy. It’d be great if we could just count the characters and be done with it, but things are never quite that easy. We’ve got three complications to consider:

(1) Character widths vary

Google uses the Arial font for result titles, and Arial is proportional. In other words, different characters occupy different amounts of space. A lower- case ‘l’ is going to occupy much less space than an upper-case ‘W’. The total width is measured in pixels, not characters, and the maximum amount you can fit in that space depends on what you’re trying to say.

In our 10,000-keyword tracking set, the title below is the longest cut or uncut display title we measured, clocking in at 77 characters:

This title has 14 i’s and lowercase l’s, 10 lowercase t’s, and 3 narrow punctuation marks, creating a character count bonanza. To count this title and say that yours can be 77 characters would be dangerously misleading.

(2) Titles break at whole words

Prior to this change, Google was breaking words at whatever point the cut-off happened. Now, they seem to be breaking titles at whole words. If the cut happens in the middle of a long word, the remaining length might be considerably shorter. For example, here’s a word that’s just not going to fit into your display title twice, and so the cut comes well short of the full width:

(3) Google is appending brands

In some cases, Google is cutting off titles and then appending the brand to the end. Unfortunately, this auto-appended brand text still occupies space and counts against your total allowance. This was the shortest truncated display title in our data set, measuring only 34 words pre-cut:

The brand text “- The Homestead” was appended by Google and is not part of the sites <TITLE> tag. The next word in the title was “Accommodations”, so the combination of the brand add-on and long word made for a very truncated title.

Data from 10,000 searches

Examples can be misleading, so we wanted to take a deeper dive. We pulled all of the page-1 display titles from the 10,000-keyword MozCast tracking set, which ends up being just shy of 90,000 titles. Uncut titles don’t tell us much, since they can be very short in some cases. So, let’s focus on the titles that got cut. Here are the character lengths (not counting ” …”) of the cut titles:

We’ve got a fairly normal distribution (skewed a little to the right) with both a mean and median right around 63. So, is 63 our magic number? Not quite. Roughly half the cut titles in our data set had less than 63 characters, so that’s still a fairly risky length.

The trick is to pick a number where we feel fairly confident that the title won’t be cut off, on average (a guaranteed safe zone for all titles would be far too restrictive). Here are a few select percentages of truncated titles that were above a certain character length:

• 55% of cut titles >= 63 (+2) characters
• 91% of cut titles >= 57 (+2) characters
• 95% of cut titles >= 55 (+2) characters
• 99% of cut titles >= 48 (+2) characters

In research, we might stick to a 95% or 99% confidence level (note: this isn’t technically a confidence interval, but the rationale is similar), but I think 90% confidence is a decent practical level. If we factor in the ” …”, that gives us about +2 characters. So, my recommendation is to keep your titles under 60 characters (57+2 = 59).

Keep in mind, of course, that cut-offs aren’t always bad. A well placed “…” might actually increase click-through rates on some titles. A fortuitous cut-off could create suspense, if you trust your fortunes to Google:

Now that titles are cut at whole words, we also don’t have to worry about text getting cut off at confusing or unfortunate spots. Take, for example, the dangerous predicament of The International Association of Assemblages of Assassin Assets:

Prior to the redesign, their titles were a minefield. Yes, that contributed nothing to this post, but once I had started down that road, it was already too late.

So, that’s it then, right?

Well, no. As Google evolves and adapts to a wider range of devices, we can expect them to continue to adjust and test display titles. In fact, they’re currently test a new, card-style format for desktop SERPs where each result is boxed and looks like this:

We’re not even entirely sure that the current change is permanent. The narrower format is still appearing for some people under some conditions. If this design sticks, then I’m comfortable saying that keeping your title length under 60 characters will prevent the majority of cut-offs.

Note: People have been asking when we’ll update our title tag tool. We’re waiting to make sure that this design change is permanent, but will try to provide an update ASAP. Updates and a link to that tool will appear in this post when we make a final decision.

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