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Highlights brought to you by Search Lately @SMGSearchUK this week include: Google Ad Rotation Out Of Your Hands?
Google Launched Mobile App Extension
Google Penguin Update Reviewed Google Easter Egg For Gaming Nerds Browse last week’s Search Lately for more details and initial reaction from industry experts on recent hot topics
Google Ad Rotation Out Of Your Hands? – 1st May 2012 Google announced just this week that they will be terminating the option to indefinitely rotate ads evenly. Currently advertisers have 3 options when it comes to controlling how Google displays creative: optimise for clicks, optimise for conversions and rotate evenly. These options will soon be removed and advertisers will only be able to rotate ads evenly for the first 30 days after a new ad change has been made in an ad group. After this the ads will automatically be displayed based on those deemed the most likely to be clicked or in other words with the highest CTR. Google continues to try and think for us and mould search marketing into its idealistic vision, although will all advertisers be happy with this change? While some may feel 30 days is more than enough time to run a creative test and make a concrete decision, others may feel they need longer. For example, if an ad group is not receiving significant traffic volumes, then is 30 days really enough time to test creative? By taking this decision on optimising ad copy out of the hands of the advertiser, Google is attempting to make life easier for us all. Although while it may seem like a no brainer to auto-optimise for clicks, many would much rather prefer to optimise to conversions. Should advertisers have the free will to choose when and how to rotate their own ad copy, or are Google helping us to help ourselves? Only time will tell if this results in higher volumes and more relevant volumes quicker, or will less reliable conclusions will be made off the back of it. – Kevin Ting More details: searchenginewatch.com/article/2171509/AdWords-Limits-New-Ad-Rotationto-30-Days
Google Launched Mobile App Extension – 30th Apr 2012 Google AdWords has introduced a new Ad Extension - the Mobile App extension. The Mobile App extension allows advertisers to append a mobile app download link to their search ads. The mobile app extension gives advertisers a new distribution channel for their mobile apps and users a new discovery medium. Beta participants saw a 6% lift in CTR for campaigns using Mobile App extensions, compared to control campaigns. Advertisers running campaigns solely focused on promoting and driving downloads of their app will benefit from recent changes that add more useful information to their click-to-download ads. When a user searches and your click-to-download ad appears, they’ll be able to see image previews, a
description of your app, and when applicable, pricing and rating information. All this new information in the click-to-download ad is automatically drawn from the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. – Blair Liu More details: googlemobileads.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/making-search-ads-work-forbusinesses.html
Google Penguin Update Reviewed – 30th April 2012 On the 24th April Google released the Penguin update that was designed to punish websites that were considered as spam. It differs from Panda whereby instead of targeting low quality websites that lack content the Penguin update sought to directly penalise websites that were guilty of keyword stuffing or cloaking (showing different versions of a website to search engines and one version to genuine users) and that didn’t offer end users a genuine benefit. It seems that Google have a fondness for black and white animals however the penguin update isn’t cute and cuddly for those websites that harbour spam. It does however seem to have targeted sites that offer a genuine product or service judging by the amount of comments from disgruntled website owners on Google’s own webmaster central blog. I’m sure everyone who appreciates good quality sites will be jubilant at such news however we will have to wait and see how Google handles those sites that have been penalised for no apparent reason. – Alex Pye More details: searchengineland.com/google-launches-update-targeting-webspam-insearch-results-119295
Google Easter Egg for Gaming Nerds – 27th April 2012 Last Friday Google announced a new Easter egg treat for all Googlers to celebrate the much loved space strategy game called “Starcraft”. Type ‘zerg rush’ into Google to start having some keyword-less fun today! – Kevin Ting Please note that this works in Google Chrome Only! More details: google.co.uk/zerg_rush