Six of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week we have SHOCK HORROR loads of updates both good and confusing from Google, plus one or two other stats and related social news. Oh and a running gag that loses its steam halfway through. What a week!

Google strengthening its mobile friendly algorithm

As we reported yesterday, Google is strengthening its mobile friendly ranking signal.

Since April last year, if you’ve not been offering a mobile optimised version of your website you may well have suffered a drop in rankings, although many experts believed the initial change in the signal led to fairly negligible results.

However from May 2016, Google will step up the pressure on non-optimised sites by strengthening its algorithm. You have less than two months to comply!

Or something that sounds less like a threat from Robocop. Actually maybe that is a good analogy.

Google issues guidelines on bloggers and links for freebies

As Graham Charlton reported late last Friday, Google has issued guidelines for bloggers who receive free products from companies.

Google’s advice is that bloggers should ‘nofollow’ any links to products that they may have received as a free gift, as these haven’t been obtained organically through honest-to-goodness link-earning.

It seems straightforward enough, Google doesn’t like any link-building scheme that involves the exchange of money or a like-for-like link placement. Plus the word ‘scheme’ just sounds a bit sordid anyway.

Unfortunately this raises all kinds of questions and only spreads the ‘grey area’ even further around the SEO landscape. Or something…

• Is this the responsibility of the bloggers or the brands/agencies?
• How can Google tell the difference between a link added in return for a freebie and a natural link?
• Should bloggers be worried? Will Google make an example of one or two sites as it did with guest blogging?
• Why don’t you leave us alone Google, who are you, Robocop?

In a follow-up post, we raise the above questions with a few experts. Apart from that last question. That would’ve just been weird.

Google Analytics launches 360 Suite, promises a better view of the “complete customer journey”

Google Analytics has launched a brand new product this week called Google Analytics 360.

It promises to help enterprises (i.e. its fanciest, richest customers) achieve a more fully-formed view of the customer through a set of “integrated data and marketing analytics products.”

These include:

• Google Audience Center 360 (beta): Google’s first ever data management platform (DMP).
• Google Optimize 360 (beta): a website testing and personalization product.
• Google Data Studio 360 (beta): a data analysis and visualization tool.
• Google Tag Manager 360: a standalone improvement on its previous tag management product.
• Google Analytics 360: the new version of GA Premium.
• Google Attribution 360: the new version of Adometry.

It all sounds pretty good and worth raiding the pot of loose change you have on your desk for. I’ve got about £3.67, I reckon if you can put in the rest we can go twos on it.

Although I’m sure Google will find a way to police our ‘little scheme’.

Instagram to adopt an ‘algorithm’ and show posts out of chronological order

As we reported a couple of days ago, Instagram has announced that will be adopting an algorithm that will show posts from the people you interact with/care about the most at the top of your news feed.

So a bit like Facebook or Twitter.

“The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post. As we begin, we’re focusing on optimizing the order — all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.”

In the following article I waffle on about whether Instagram’s algorithm is a good thing or not.

Mobile ad spend overtakes desktop for the first time

According to Marin in an analysis of $7.8bn of annualised ad spend, mobile has overtaken desktop for the first time, with more than 50% of budgets spent on mobile ads.

• Social ads accounted for three-quarters of clicks and 71% of spend
• Three out of five display conversions took place on a smartphone, a 30% increase on last year
• Click-throughs on search ads were more than three times higher than social and display

Search ads on desktop still attract more impressions and conversions, however, smartphones continued to dominate year-on-year growth, with clicks and spend rising 13% and 11%, respectively.

Google updates the smartphone user agent of Googlebot

From 18 April, Google will update its smartphone Googlebot crawler from an iPhone user-agent to an Android user-agent.

Here’s what the new Googlebot smartphone user-agent looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://ift.tt/eSXNch)

Basically Google is replacing iPhone and Safari with Android and Chrome.

Why the change?

“We’re updating the user-agent string so that our renderer can better understand pages that use newer web technologies. Our renderer evolves over time and the user-agent string indicates that that it is becoming more similar to Chrome than Safari.”

Apparently this may only affect 1% of all websites, but it may be worth checking it with the Fetch and Render tool in Search Console, just in case.

That’s it for this week. And remember, stay out of trouble!

 

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Six of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week, a slightly less tumultuous one then last week, but there’s still some juicy stats, intriguing updates and hot gossip.

AdWords CTR increases as Right Side Ads dropped

Possibly surprising nobody, Google dropping ads from the right sidebar has meant that the click-through rate has increased on paid search results at the top of the screen.

Mainly because that’s all we see now.

Accuracast has taken a look at the CTR during the 7-day period before and after the change in ad placements on Google desktop search.

It shows a large increase of 18.2% for ads in position 4, and substantial increases for position 1 and 2 (8.4% & 7.7% respectively).

Interestingly, the only ad position where the CTR dropped after the change, has been for position 3.

According to Accuracast this is understandable, “as the third ad unit used to sit just above the organic search results. Now it’s in the middle of a block of ads, and is more likely to be skimmed over.”

Position 4 is the new position 3.

Facebook to favour live videos over recorded videos in the News Feed… kind of

In an announcement this week, Facebook has stated that its recently rolled out Facebook Live Videos service has received an update where live streaming videos uploaded via the service are more likely to appear higher in the News Feed when they are actually live, as opposed to after they’re available as pre-recorded videos.

According to Facebook:

“People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live. This is because Facebook Live videos are more interesting in the moment than after the fact.”

It doesn’t necessarily mean ALL live videos will rank higher than ANY standard video, but it is an interesting change.

Smash cut: one year from now, all the actors from Star Wars Episode VIII having to do a live reenactment of the trailer every time a Facebook user scrolls through their feed.

Investment in mobile app ads drives 196% increase in installs

Kenshoo has published a new report on mobile app advertising detailing a few interesting industry trends, including…

• Total spend on mobile app install ads increased 155% year-over-year (YoY)
• Mobile app installs increased 196% YoY
• Cost per install decreased 14% YoY
• App install ads on Instagram delivered more than 20% of all app install ad
  clicks
• Once consumers click on a gaming app ad, they are much more likely to install compared to consumer apps (39% vs. 11%) resulting in a drastically reduced cost per install (CPI) ($1.73 vs. $2.70)

Snapchat now boasts 8 billion video views per day

It was only in January when Snapchat stated it had 7 billion video views per day. Now, barely more than a month later, you can add another billion to that number.

This is even more impressive when you consider that Snapchat had ‘just’ two billion daily video views in May 2015.

According to Recode Snapchat is serving the same number of daily video views as Facebook.

You can learn lots about Snapchat in this helpful guide over at ClickZ.

The Dress: one year on #DoomedToRepeatHistory

Yes that’s right, this week saw the anniversary of the global incident that has come to be known as The Event – no wait that was a toxic cloud – The Dress!

And in honour of this occasion Moz and Fractl have released as study on the impact of PR stunts.

The research takes into account press mentions, organic traffic, and backlinks, based on seven companies that appeared in the news between February 2015 and February 2016.

You can see seven different PR stunt examples in the online flipbook but for ‘old time’s sake’ here are some stats from The Airborne Toxic Event… sorry The Dress…

• Roman Original’s, the makers of #TheDress, received a 560% increase in global sales within one day of media coverage.
• Negative stories received 172% more headlines and 176% more social shares.
• Large companies’ traffic and backlinks saw less dramatic increases after the media frenzy, even though these brands were mentioned in 148% more headlines.

Head of Wikimedia resigns over search engine plans

As we’ve covered recently in the news round-up, Wikimedia may or may not be developing its own rival search engine to Google. There’s an excellently detailed account of the affair so far here: everything you need to know about the Knowledge Engine – and the latest gossip is that the executive director of the Wikimedia foundation, has resigned.

According to The Guardian, this follows a “row within the community over leaked plans” which were indeed to build a Google-rivalling search engine.

Tretikov wrote in her resignation letter:

“I am both inspired by, and proud of, the many great things we have all accomplished at the Foundation over the last two years, most significantly reversing the loss of our editorial community … I remain passionate about the value and potential of open knowledge and Wikimedia to change the world.”

And that’s probably the closest we’ll get to TMZ.

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Six of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

Oh you’ve been away all week? Right, okay. Well sit down. We have some news.

Google’s been making some changes…

Google kills its Right Hand Side Ads

The inescapable news this week is of course Google AdWords removing all the ads from the right hand of its SERPs.

Now instead of seeing PPC listings, you’ll either see an odd blank space, or Product Listing Ads, or the standard Knowledge Graph for Ryan Gosling (or insert your current crush here – mine’s still Ryan Gosling).

The ramifications for the change are myriad, but the biggest change for user and marketer alike is the increase in PPC ads at the top of the SERP from three possible links to four.

And speaking of Google…

Google launches Accelerated Mobile Pages

Although we had been expecting the launch of AMP – Google’s open source initiative which aims to improve the performance of the mobile web – around now anyway, Google began rolling out AMP at the beginning of this week (Tues 23 Feb).

@sewatch Sure, try this one http://pic.twitter.com/HVjCg1CEPA

— Mark Chalcraft (@markchalcraft) February 23, 2016

As expected, pages enabled with AMP carry a symbol on their mobile search results to tell users they are faster loading pages. And you can probably be certain that this is a positive ranking factor.

There’s lots more information on Google’s AMP project here.

And speaking of Google AGAIN…

Google to close its financial comparison service

For some people this may be the biggest (positive) change of the week. Google is to shut down Google Compare from March 23 in both the UK and US.

As Graham Charlton reports, “On the face of it, this news will have competitor comparison sites jumping for joy, as Google Compare constituted a major threat to their own business models.”

A spokesperson from Google stated it has decided to focus more intently on AdWords and other future innovations, which will “enable us to provide fresh, comprehensive answers to Google users, and to provide our financial services partners with the best return on investment.”

Facebook rolls out new Like buttons

In non-Google news, Facebook has added to your arsenal of social interactions with a variety of facial expressions and emojis.

They’re called Reactions.

I still don’t have them yet and I’ve got a LOT of anger built up about it and when I eventually get them EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY FRIENDS is getting the furious face.

Outgoing links probably good for your sites SEO

Reboot recently carried out a study to prove somewhat definitively whether or not the strength of a site’s outgoing links has an effect on ranking.

The good news is that yes it does.

Reboot created 10 new websites each targeting the same keyword, only half of which included links to high authority sites and after five months it was concluded that, “Outgoing relevant links to authoritative sites are considered in the algorithms and do have a positive impact on rankings.”

For a complete guide to the research and lots more well-explained graphs such as the one above, visit the study and be safe in the knowledge that linking to bigger sites will definitely not do you any harm in search.

Call your mum

Finally, Bing has released a few search insights in time for Mother’s Day, revealing that more than half of Mother’s Day retail searches are set to be made from a mobile device.

• Over 60% of searches are expected to be made on the move via mobile, with search volumes set to increase by five times between 7am-9am on the day itself.
• Women take the lead in searching for gifts, making up over two thirds (67%) of all searches.
• Searches will increase by up to four times in the 48 hours leading up to Mother’s Day.

I’m merely including this to remind you that Mother’s Day is 6th March, so you have more than a week to buy a card. You’re welcome.

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Six of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week we have a couple of updates from Facebook, an emphatic ’no we’re not going to take on Google’ from Wikipedia, what times of day you can bug the support team at AdWords and swearing.

Facebook adds new video metrics to Page Insight

From this week, Facebook’s Page Insights has been redesigned and now includes new video metrics much demanded from publishers.

These include:

• Minutes Viewed: The total minutes of watch time spent on the video. This is one of the most requested video metrics from publishers, and we’re excited to make it available today.
• 10-Second Views: The number of times the video was viewed to 10 seconds. If the video is shorter than 10 seconds, this metric refers to the number of times people viewed at least 97 percent of the video.
• Sound-on vs. Sound-off: A breakdown between views with sound and views without sound is available for both Views and 10-Second Views.

According to the announcement, “the updated design also makes it easy for publishers to access more granular video performance data by clicking through individual metrics on the updated Insights view.”

Facebook’s Instant Articles will be opening up to all publishers

Instant Articles allow publishers to upload full articles to Facebook, with various interactive features, high quality video and images and 10 times faster loading speed than standard mobile web.

Previously this had only been available to a select few hundred (Buzzfeed, Slate, National Geographic) but as of April 12th this feature will be available to every publisher big or small.

Wikipedia is NOT building a global web-crawling search engine. Honest!

Although reports earlier in the week seemed to suggest that a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for something known as the ‘Knowledge Engine Project’ would lead to “the world’s first transparent search engine”, Wikipedia has now stated that’s not the case…

“What are we not doing? We’re not building a global crawler search engine… Despite headlines, we are not trying to compete with other platforms, including Google. As a non-profit we are noncommercial and support open knowledge. Our focus is on the knowledge contributed on the Wikimedia projects.”

Instead Wikimedia will use the grant to research how exactly people use, interact and find information on Wikipedia and use this to make “improvements to discovery.”

Google AdWords support now available 24 hours

We’re now offering support through our English AdWords Twitter, G+, Facebook, and YouTube pages 24 hours a day, Monday – Friday! #AskAdWords

— Google AdWords (@adwords) February 11, 2016

But no, you can’t ring them at 3am and ask why your advert for cheap sheds isn’t appearing properly. It will instead be available through social channels from Monday to Friday on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and YouTube.

Rich media achieves the highest completion rates on mobile

As reported by WARC, a new benchmark has found that the most effective way of reaching mobile consumers is through mobile rich media and interactive in-stream, as these achieve the highest completion rates.

This is according to RhythmOne’s 2015 Mobile Advertising Benchmarks Report which also found the following from its study of US-based mobile programs, spanning 20 advertiser categories and encompassing five ad formats:

• Mobile Rich Media (93.7%) and Interactive In-Stream Video (87.4%) garner the highest video completion and engagement rates with consumers.
• Mobile Full Page ads are ideal for driving engagement on tablets (14.2%), and
• Mobile Rich Media units are ideal for driving engagement on smartphones (10.7%).
• Adding an interactive element to :15 second In-Stream Video can significantly decrease consumer drop-off.
• Increased video length (:30 seconds versus :15 seconds) negatively impacts VCR for a number of advertiser categories.

Swear words in email subject lines increases open rates by 28.6%

Have you wondered how swearing can affect whether a recipient opens your email or not. Well, wonder no flipping more…

New research from Mailjet has found that British people are almost 30% more likely to open an email if the subject line includes a swear word.

However, the same cannot be said for American recipients.

• British people responded well to swearing in the subject line opening 27% of emails, compared to only 17% being opened in America
• British people responded best to ‘old fashioned’ swear words, such as ‘numpty’ which increased open rates by 26%
• Even ‘soft’ swear words had a negative effect on an American audience with a 30% decrease in open rates when the subject line included a curse word

Heck yeah!

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Six of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week

This week: changes to structured snippets, a new feature on YouTube, online ad stats and Bing is going to decide what you’re having for dinner.

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