Technology News and Industry Knowledge

Google Ads will automatically pause low-activity keywords, starting in June, according to an email sent to advertisers by the Google Ads team. What is low activity? Campaigns that were created more than 13 months ago and that have had zero impressions in the past 13 months. Why we care. Navah Hopkins explained it well on LinkedIn: “Keywords with no impressions in your account are dragging down your account performance. We’ve seen documentation from the DOJ trial highlighting an account Quality Score – what do you think having hundreds/thousands of zero impression keywords does to the account?” Unpausing paused keywords. If you unpause a paused keyword in Google Ads, Google will automatically pause it again if it receives no impressions over the next three months. Why the change. So advertisers “focus on keywords that drive results,” Google said. Ad group pause. As a reminder, Google Ads began automatically pausing ad groups with low activity in March. Via Search Engine Lan...

If you’ve ever tried using avatars or buyer personas to write a Google Ads headline, you know it can be frustrating and fruitless. You try to define your target market, only to be told, “Our audience is anyone who wants our product – we don’t exclude anyone.” Persist a bit and you might refine it to “Ages 25-45 in metropolitan areas.” Eventually, you craft a detailed persona : Alex, 37, from Chicago, who enjoys protein smoothies, drives a Lexus and dreams of traveling to Asia.  The problem is that going ultra-deep in a psychographic profile doesn’t actually help you craft a 30-character headline for fleet management software. This article tackles the steps to successfully transform your PPC ads just by focusing on the people who click them. Your ad shouldn’t be for everyone Targeting a specific client avatar, like “Alex from Chicago,” doesn’t translate to an effective headline. Aiming your ad at everyone interested in fleet management software isn’t the solution either. Wh...

The Google interface we know today will be gone in less than three years. As ridiculous as this prediction may seem, I remember back in 2004 when Google.com finally overtook Yahoo.com. For eight years, no one thought that would ever happen, but it did. Why? Simply put, Yahoo had the best user experience on the web for 10 years, but Google provided a better one. Now, think about this. Let’s say you have all kinds of questions about the world: Do I need to wear a jacket out today? What’s the best sushi restaurant near here? Give me a hint to today’s Wordle. And what if you had a butler who was brilliant at every subject in the world and could give you the best answer to any question you had, not just an accurate answer but helpful, friendly and thoughtful? “It’s a little chilly out, so wear a light jacket in the morning. You can probably take it off around noon.” “Sushi Kingdom is a 15-minute drive from here, but they have the most amazing fatty tuna shipped in from Japan....

Google has replaced First Input Delay (FID) with a new Core Web Vitals metric called Interaction to Next Paint (INP). This change aims to better measure a website’s responsiveness and overall user experience.  This article explains what INP is, why it has replaced FID, how to check your site’s INP score, and various techniques to improve INP and enhance website responsiveness. What is Interaction to Next Paint (INP)? Google uses INP to assess your site’s overall responsiveness. If you click on a drop-down menu and there’s a delay with its opening, this latency shows poor responsiveness and relates to INP. If there are issues with INP, user experience suffers because the user may continue clicking on your site’s menu, waiting for a response. INP is the time it takes from the initial user interaction and when the next frame on the site is painted. Why did INP replace FID? Google previously announced that INP would replace FID because the latter was a metric that had its li...

The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) now has 111 potential concerns over Google’s Privacy Sandbox, according to its April Q1 2024 report. That’s up from 72 in the CMA’s Q4 2023 report, released January. Why we care. The CMA’s January report made it clear that Google couldn’t proceed with third-party cookie deprecation . Sure enough, Google announced a third delay in the phase-out of cookies , with hopes to complete the process in 2025. But again, this is just a delay. Third-party cookies will go away. Why the concerns? The CMO and the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) are concerned the Privacy Sandbox could make Google even more dominant, giving them an unfair advantage that could hurt advertisers, competing ad platforms, publishers and users. Multi-touch concerns. One addition to the report is around concerns over Google’s approach to attribution: “Stakeholders have expressed further concerns around Google’s approach to multi-touch attribution, arguin...

Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot is now available for all advertisers across the Microsoft Advertising Platform, a month after they increased the testing pool , the company announced today. Why we care: Microsoft touts CopIlot as a way for advertisers to save time on routine tasks, focus on strategic decision-making and improve overall performance. We’ll be watching closely to see whether these claims are actually true for advertisers. What’s new. Copilot offers several AI-powered capabilities within the ad platform, including: Natural language conversational chat to get answers and synthesize info. Recommendations for ad creative assets like images and copy. AI-generated images and other assets on demand. Integrated throughout the platform UI and workflows. What it looks like. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like in the Microsoft platform: And what Copilot looks like answering a question about campaign performance: What’s next: An upcoming pilot will allow adver...

B2B lead generation through paid search is constantly evolving. Today’s effective PPC strategies differ from previous years. B2B marketers must adapt and zero in on: Hyper-personalization using first-party data. Leveraging account-based marketing to target high-intent audiences. Engaging and educating prospects with interactive content. Developing compelling video assets for Performance Max and beyond. Using AI-driven automation. 1. Hyper-personalization using first-party data Focusing on hyper-personalization to engage our target audience is necessary, but it has become even more difficult as Google cracks down on personalization policies in Google Ads.  This strategy involves leveraging your company’s data analytics and advanced segmentation techniques to deliver tailored content and offers to individual prospects based on your preferences, behaviors and demographics. Break out your campaigns in Google Ads by industry, job title or other ways to best segment your au...

Getting international SEO right is hugely important for global brands. And one of the most fundamental optimizations is the domain and URL structure you choose to use.  While Google offers guidelines for using locale-specific URLs , SEO information on the topic is limited and sometimes confusing.  Many SEOs tend to advise using ccTLDs in each market if you have the resources. Others argue for subdirectories with a gTLD . Heaven help anyone who says subdomains are just as viable . Spoiler alert: our data suggests they might be.  So, we recently released our study on domain structures for international SEO to add some data to this conversation.  At the very least, we wanted to understand how popular different domain structures were. We also hoped our analysis might reveal some secrets about how Google’s algorithm responds to different domain structures internationally. Below are our key findings. 1. 56% of the top three positions are held by ccTLDs Our da...