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November 21, 2019

Good morning, I see carousels.

(I now realize The Sixth Sense came out 20 years ago and maybe 10 readers will get my dated reference.) Anyway, it turns out we are all seeing carousels.

Rich answers have more than doubled in Google mobile search results in the past year, with huge growth (151%) in the occurrence of image carousels, according to a new study from Perficient Digital that looked at 1.4 million Google mobile search queries. Get those images optimized.

And speaking of rich results, Google has added Product results to the Performance report in GSC so you can get a better look at click and impression data when rich results display based on your use of product rich results markup.

E-commerce marketers, if you can please take 10 minutes out of your day to take our (anonymized) Amazon Advertising survey, I will be grateful. Even better than my appreciation, you can enter to win an All-Access Pass to any U.S. SMX conference within the next two years. Thank you in advance! Head straight to the Amazon Advertising survey here.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip in which Kirk Williams responds to a recent article and shares where he thinks paid search — and digital advertising more broadly — have actually gone awry.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

Digital advertising is not the dot com bubble, improper attribution is

“Advertising is the ‘new dot com bubble’ according to this intriguing article written on The Correspondent,” explains Kirk Williams of ZATO. “The thing I believe the article alludes to, but doesn’t actually identify as the actual bubble, is an improper understanding of attribution and how that establishes misguided tactics for paid search accounts that fail to build brands and add incremental value. In other words, I am positing that paid search advertising itself has not failed, it’s that an understanding of how to use paid search advertising as part of an integrated marketing mix for individual companies has failed. Improper use of attribution has led to an obsession with directly tracked results that over time do not build a brand and incremental sales. They simply re-target (not necessarily remarketing, btw) the same users already in the sales cycle – ad nauseam. In this regard, I would suggest that conversion tracking is as much of a curse as it is a blessing.”

Read more »

Performance marketing comes to television

Sponsored Content by SteelHouse Live

For performance marketers, television has never been great. The term “broadcast” sums it all up — because of a lack of precise audience targeting capabilities, advertisers are forced into casting a pretty broad net. That’s great for branding and raising awareness, but it’s pretty useless …

Read more »

Search Shorts

Disconnected links are ignored

Cut the link. Google’s John Mueller said: “Links are between indexed URLs, so if one side is gone, the link is ignored.”

Last mod. You can use the last modification date to help communicate that the page has changed and should be reprocessed by Google, said John Mueller of Google.

Scrapers. Someone asked Google if there is a work around to the Google captchas, so he can scrape the search results and/or pay for them via an API. Google said no.

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