Verve’s roundup of all things search in January 2017.
Google has announced a potential new addition to its arsenal of Adwords weaponry. To date advertisers have been able to show their telephone number with their location extension, but with more and more businesses requiring multiple contact numbers for each physical address this extension needed to evolve. The recent announcement from Google reached advertisers by email and hinted towards local numbers being shown with local extensions. It is now more important than ever to ensure that if you have multiple location extensions for each business address, you make sure the phone number is correct as Google could some be showing the location specific telephone number as opposed to the general call extension.
When Google makes it one! Negative keyword lists are vitally important to our Google Adword campaigns as they ensure our ads are not shown for search phrases we do not want to appear for. By including negative keywords we tell Google if ‘x’ word or words appear in a users search do not show our ad. Most of us advertisers have a generic negative keyword list that contains words that we do not want our ads to show for and this ‘generic’ list is applied to pretty much every account we manage. These lists contain word such as ‘profanity words’ and ‘non buying intent words’ (such as review, how to, guide for etc). Google has now made it easier for us to use a negative keyword list across multiple accounts. If you manage multiple accounts in an MMC account or through Adwords editor you can now a negative keyword list though the shared library.
Recently users of the Google search engine have noticed videos appear in the Google image search for retail based search queries on mobile. To date the Google image search has been reserved solely for images (as the name suggests), however recently a few agencies noticed a few videos start to appear in the Google image search. The videos in question were from major high street clothing retailers New Look and River Island. The videos contained no sound and played on a continuous loop, but it is an indication that video could become more and more important in our marketing activities.
Alex Chitu spotted a new Google image search test on mobile.
A screenshot from Alex Chitu.
Ad scheduling has long been a useful tool for advertisers both in Googles Adwords platform and Microsoft Advertising® – Formerly Bing Ads® have ad extensions for that matter so combining the targeting methods of ad scheduling with the extra promotion and real estate gained for ad extensions is a win win for advertisers and this is exactly what Bing have started to roll exactly this and advertisers have already started to see this feature in their accounts. The new feature will allow advertisers to schedule the times that a specific ad extension shows and offers tighter control over what an advertiser wants a user to see and when.