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• Google brings AI-powered ad suggestions to AdWords campaigns. The new campaigns will get optimization suggestion from Google’s AI.  
• Google is testing phrase free AdWords Campaign. 
• Automated PPC bidding is not ideal in all the situations. Here’s a comprehensive article that explains in great detail that when you should not use automated bidding. 
• Google has recently launched a new tool “reach planner” that helps you spend your marketing budget wisely. 
• Don’t want Google to run ads automatically? Here’s how you can opt out of AdWords Ad suggestions.
• Bing has recently launched 4 new features within their Bing shopping campaigns interface. 
• The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is new privacy regulations that are going into place officially on May 25th, 2018. IN response to this rule, Google is making big changes, especially within Youtube Ads. Find out. 
• Bing Ads has launched New Price extensions. According to bing, this will help advertisers show the right product at the right time. 
• Google has launched TrueView that helps advertisers to promote their products/service more effectively. The bumper ads which are 6 seconds long are the first to be introduced.
   

Google has announced new features to the Google My Business API, a brand new GMB agency dashboard & also launched a partner program. 

Google My Business API Version 4.1 Features

• Customer Provided Media: You can now retrieve and view insights for user generated photos and video for locations you own & manage.
• Admin Management APIs: You can now list, accept, & decline account and location related invitations for your account.
• Merchant Provided Description: Describe your business in your own voice and share with users the unique story of your business & offerings.
• Opening Date: Provide the date that your location opened for business.
• Offer Type Posts: A new type of Post on Google, helping users find deals available at your locations.

Agency Dashboard
The new agency dashboard is designed for those who manage multiple businesses and gives these folks:

• Single Organization Accounts on Google My Business to manage all locations and no longer limited to 100 locations.
• User Groups to manage internal teams and control access to locations.
• Improved search functionality enabling users to efficiently search for locations within an account and across location groups.
• Easier workflows to send and receive invitations to manage listings.

Partner Program
Trusted partners will be eligible for early access to new Google My Business features, a partner manager, and the potential to be featured on the Google My Business website. You can sign up for notification of this program here.
 

A recent study shows that more review stars translate into higher paid search conversation rates. Businesses with an average of 3.31 stars managed to get 10.42 percent conversion rate, whereas, businesses that had 4.5+ stars achieved a remarkable 12.83 percent conversion rate.

The study also revealed that the response rate also affected the paid search performance. Business with highest response rate saw an average conversion rate of 13.86 percent. While the those with the lowest response rate had to settle down for 10.42. 

Engaging with customers & responding to their reviews is directly related to improved conversion rate as it builds trust among other users. 

So reviews not only help you improve the local search rankings, but also paid search ranking, and conversion rates as well.

So if you are not focusing n reviews, now is the time to do so.

To help you get more reviews for your business, we highly recommend our review widget. It’s a small piece of code which is placed on your website and helps you get positive reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook. In addition, it helps to filter out negative reviews too thus ensuring positive experience to website users. Need more details? Please connect with us.
 

You can now add description of your business directly within the Google My Business. It’s not a new feature though. Google removed this feature back in 2016 when they dropped the Google+ support. And now made it available again. This feature offers a hassle free way to keep the information about your business updated and ultimately help the searchers.

Here’s how you can add business description:

1. Login to Google My Business.
2. Click on the info button on the menu bar.
3. Click on the add business description
4. Click on the pencil icon and add info.

The character limit is 750, out of which only 250 characters will be visible in the knowledge panel. So make it crisp and engaging. You can use the copy from your best-performing AdWords ad as inspiration.

• Google has finally released the new keyword planning tool in AdWords. However, you have to wait just a little more to try it yourself.
• What Startups Can Learn from ‘Tax Relief’ PPC Campaigns.
• Bing recently rolled out a fix to Intelligent Tracking Preventions (ITP).
• Delayed growth of close variants following google changes now becoming clear.
• Bing Ads’ new Audience Segmentation feature makes list performance comparisons easy.
• Google provided the users with the ability to “Opt-out” from the re-marketing campaigns.
• 10X Your A/B Testing with AdWords Ad Variations.
• Here are some excellent strategies for E-commerce campaigns.
• 5 critical factors for optimizing luxury E-commerce sites.
• Everything you need to know about Facebook live ads.
• A guide to Snapchat ads manager.
   

•    The Dynamic search ads allow you to target the entire website or domain name so that you can target a broad audience. However, Google has made some significant changes to it and the changes will go live soon. To know exactly how it will affect you, click.

•    Google allowed the advertiser to spend as much as twice the daily budget simply to get more money from their pocket. But how advertisers are responding to it and does it really changed anything within AdWords … find out.

•    Google and Facebook get biggest slice of advertising cake. A recent study revealed that 1/4 (61%) of the global advertising spend goes to Google and Facebook. However, the number may drop soon as people are starting to allocate their ad budget to different platforms. 

•    Google officially removed the Adwords Review extension and all the performance data will be deleted by Feb 2018.

•    Last year we saw shocking reports that YouTube ads were running alongside some inappropriate videos. It scared the advertiser because it would cause more harm than good. Addressing the issue, YouTube has now made it mandatory for the YouTubers to have at least 1000 subscribers and 4000h watch time if they want to monetize their content.

•    Re-marketing is one of the best marketing weapons in your arsenal. Here’s a great tutorial on how to utilize it to the fullest.

•    What is Doubleclick adoptive re-marketing and how does it work. Find out.

•    Manually selecting placements to run display ads may seem like a good option, but it is not the right solution to click frauds. Also, it makes you miss the flexibility of automated placements.

•    Re-marketing is good but only if done in a balanced manner. Many advertisers overdo it and as a result, annoy the users. Although Google can’t tell advertisers to stop targeting a particular user, they may give the power to the users to block re-marketing ads coming from a specific advertiser.
 

It’s 2018 and if your web page takes more than 10 seconds to load, then you are far behind! Nobody likes to wait for minutes just for your page to load — they will simply hit the back button. According to a study, 53% of the users will abandon the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load! So it came as no surprise when Google announced that site speed will be a ranking factor within the mobile search results from July 2018. 

However, Google assured that only a small percentage of the sites will be affected by it since the majority of the site loads faster than 10 seconds. Also, there will be exceptions to websites which provide relevant and high-quality content to users. Those websites can still rank well in the search engine result pages because the intent of the search query is still a strong factor.

If you are not sure about your site’s speed, you can use the Google’s “Test My Site” tool. This tool uses a standard 3G connection to replicate what most people are using to surf the web using mobiles. It not only tells you about your site speed but also gives suggestions on how you can improve.
 

What About AMP?

Google's announcement stated that it "applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page”, which means AMP gets no special advantage except that by its very nature it will pass all of these speed standards with flying colors. However, that doesn't mean that you get an automatic pass if you're using AMP because you need to be sure that everything is set up properly. If you need any help with mobile optimization, we can assist. Just reach out to us and we will be able assist you further.

When it comes to ads, relevance plays a vital role. Google has provided many tools that help advertisers ensure that they are targeting the right people. They just have to evaluate the quality score & it’s components. Recently Google has launched seven new quality score reporting columns. 

The biggest highlight is that advertisers will now be able to access the historical quality score data.  This data will be available via 4 new columns “Qual. Score (hist.),” “Landing page exper. (hist.),” “Ad relevance (hist.)” and “Exp. CTR (hist.)

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Keep in mind that they only reflect the last known score for the selected date range.

Also, you can segment data by day and see how end of day quality score changed over time.

Also, the new columns will display breakouts for: 

• Expected Click-through Rate
• Ad Relevance
• Landing Page Experience

A key metric for almost any business is conversions.

Many AdWords advertisers are already measuring their website conversions, using either AdWords Conversion Tracking or imported Google Analytics Ecommerce transactions.  Measuring actual conversions is ideal, because it allows you to optimize your bids, your ads and your website with a clear goal in mind.

However, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses aren't measuring their website conversions today. Some businesses may not have a way for users to convert on their website and others may not have the time or the technical ability to implement conversion tracking.

The Google Analytics team is committed to helping such users use their data to drive better marketing and advertising performance.  So, for businesses that don’t measure conversions in AdWords today, Google has created an easy-to-use solution: Smart Goals. Smart Goals help you identify the highest-quality visits to your website and optimize for those visits in AdWords.

Activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics
To activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics, simply go to the Admin section of your Google Analytics account, click Goals (under the View heading) and select Smart Goals.  The highest-quality visits to your website will now be turned into Smart Goals automatically.  No additional tagging or customization is required.

Import Smart Goals into AdWords
Like any other goal in Google Analytics, Smart Goals can be imported into AdWords to be used as an AdWords conversion. Once you’ve defined a conversion in AdWords, you’re able to optimize for

Optimizing for Smart Goals in AdWords
One of the benefits of measuring conversions in your AdWords account is the ability to set a target cost per acquisition (CPA) as opposed to just setting a cost per click (CPC).  If you aren’t measuring actual conversions today, importing Smart Goals as conversions in AdWords allows you to set a target CPA.  In this way, you’re able to optimize your AdWords spend based on the likelihood of conversion as determined by the model.

Smart Goals will be rolling out over the next few weeks. To be eligible for Smart Goals, your Google Analytics property must be linked to your AdWords account. Note that your Google Analytics view must receive at least 1,000 clicks from AdWords over a 30-day period to ensure the validity of your data.

The top 20 updates for local search in 2016

The mobile-friendly update began on April 21st. Fourteen days later, Google announced that more Google searches now take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries, including the US and Japan.

Google Adwords has adapted over the years to be more accommodating to mobile search, and to help advertisers measure cross device conversions.

This month, Google introduced several new products and innovations that allow you to “measure every moment that matters,” understand the full impact of your PPC campaigns and make better decisions for your business. Click here to read more.