Australia gets News Showcase and how Google handles duplicate content for paid and organic: Monday’s daily brief

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and some changes are coming to your daily newsletter,

Starting this week, you’ll be hearing from different Search Engine Land team members each day. We each have different backgrounds, areas of expertise, personalities, and points of view, and we want to make sure you get more than one perspective on what’s new in search marketing.

Coming soon, you’ll be hearing from George Nguyen, Barry Schwartz, and more of the team to get our individual outlooks on what’s new and evolving in search and the historical context behind big changes.

Happy Monday and here’s to good change!

Carolyn Lyden
Director of Search Content

Google Ads Auto-Applied Recommendations: Every setting, explained

Auto-applied recommendations are Google Ads’s AI-driven recommendations and improvements for text and display ads. The list, which has expanded dramatically over the last few years, now includes 35 options to toggle on or off from the GAAR dashboard.

Chris Boggs details every single option in the dashboard and his recommendations for each setting. Check out what Boggs says about bid, ads and extensions, and keywords and targeting settings. Tidbits include the following:

• “Add descriptions to your sitelinks.” Based on some AI-recommended short-form content I have seen, I would prefer to handle these unless this is a situation with hundreds or thousands of database-driven product-type landing pages. 
• “Add responsive search ads.” As RSAs have gotten better, I still spend time optimizing each of the ad units driving the most traffic. If your scale — based on past ETA or RSA performance — supports the tool’s ability to create “super ads” like these, it will still require manual maintenance for best performance. 
• “Add audience reporting.” This is useful for the audience data you can grow and reuse to optimize across your Google Ads campaign types, and also because it gives you insight into the audiences that are hitting that you may not have thought about.

Read more here.

Australia gets Google News Showcase

Google announced that the Google News Showcase feature is now rolling out in Australia. This comes after the news that Australia wants Google to pay for news links and Google saying it won’t do that.

“News Showcase … provides a licensing program that pays publishers to curate content for story panels across Google services and gives readers more insights into the stories that matter,” Kate Beddoe says in the announcement blog. 

A Google spokesperson told us, “It’s always been our goal to get to a workable code – we’re willing to pay publishers and are proposing to make News Showcase subject to the Code to pay publishers for value–instead of requiring payments for links and snippets”

Starting this past Wednesday, Australian publishers will be paid for their content displayed in the News Showcase. Google says publishers will have enhanced control over branding in the Showcase and even more data with analytics to determine which topics readers like the most.

On the hunt for something new in 2021? Here are the latest career opportunities in search.

Senior Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Analyst @ Bruce Clay Inc. (remote, USA)

• Formulate and build a diverse range of PPC campaigns
• Test ad copy, landing pages and other campaign elements.

SEO Analyst @ Overdrive Interactive (remote)

• Act as agency thought leader and contribute to body of thought leadership materials
• Use your SEO Analyst expertise to create strategy targeting keyword phrases

Google Analytics Specialist @ 3WhiteHats Ltd (UK)

• Developing analytics & measurement strategies for clients.
• Auditing and refining client Google Analytics accounts and implementations.

Social Media Strategy Manager @ Click Control Marketing LLC (Flint, MI)

• Generate and schedule daily content that builds meaningful connections 
• Provides input on visual content such as infographics, imagery, etc.

Enter a job opening for an opportunity to be featured in this section.

Duplicate content and Apple Maps menus

Video on duplicate content. We know a lot about how Google handles duplicate content on the organic side of search but what about on the paid side of monetization? Google’s Aurora Morales posted a video on how duplicate content impacts both paid and organic.

Apple Maps showing menus. It looks like Apple Maps is now showing menus for some restaurants, pulled from its data partner, Yelp.

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• Google Ads Rolls Out Portfolio Bid Strategies – Search Engine Roundtable
• SEO for Google Web Stories: a comprehensive guide – DeepCrawl
• Standardizing conversion attribution across all Video campaigns – Google Ads Help
• The Invoice Service of Google Ads API is out of beta – Google Ads Developer Blog