AdWords Enhanced Campaigns Now In Google Analytics

Google Analytics now is showing a new advertising section under AdWords for Enhanced Campaigns.

As you know, Enhanced Campaigns is being forced upon advertisers this July 22nd and it will become the new norm for AdWords advertisers.

There is this new section showing up in Google Analytics specifically for Enhanced Campaigns. Here is a picture from Google+.



In the Google+ thread, the advertiser explained:

The new report allows you to compare visits with clicks and see the performance of ads on different devices like computers, tablets and mobile devices.

Have you played with this report yet? What do you think?
Forum discussion at Google+.

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Google's Cutts: Be Careful Linking Many Sites Together

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts posted a video answer to the question "If I have 20 domains, should I link them all together?"

The short answer is, most likely no - you should not link them all together.

As I explained at Search Engine Land with my article titles Google's Matt Cutts: Linking 20 Domains Together Likely A "Cross Linking Scheme" - it may be considered by Google as a cross linking scheme - at least those are the words used by Matt Cutts.

Here is the video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzaimchdNpM

As you can see, the overall theme and feeling you get from Matt is that it is typically a bad idea.

So the next question I will hear is what about linking 18 sites, or 15 sites, or what about 10 or 5 sites together. I love those questions. Those asking those questions are linking the sites for one purpose, ranking.
So what about it? :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Confirmed: Google Panda Update: The "Softer" Panda Algorithm

Update: Google confirmed there is a Panda update going out now that is "more finely targeted."

There is renewed chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums about another shuffle taking place in Google. The consensus is that this update is likely Panda related.

We know Google has now slowed the Panda rollout to happen over several days and we also know Google will not confirm Panda updates anymore. We also know that Google wanted to soften the Panda algorithm a bit.

The chatter in the forum seems to back up the soften part where many folks, not all, are saying it looks like a Panda recovery has been pushed out.

Here are some quotes from the thread:

seen very big changes - clearly Panda recovery. Dramatic change on the 12th and sustained since. Average rank position, # of unique search terms driving to site both improved as well.

Major improvements here starting on the 12th and leveling off today. Traffic is now about 5% higher than 2012 after being 25% lower all year long. Panda Cub update

Despite Google telling me they won't confirm these updates anymore, I am going to try to reach out and see if this is indeed the "softer" Panda algorithm being released. If I hear back, I will let you know.

Do you think this update is Panda related?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld

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Google Tablet CPCs Rise 1.7% Above Desktop For First Time [The Search Agency Report]

The Search Agency issued its Q2 State of Paid Search report today, finding that overall impressions were up 19.2 percent across all search engines quarter-over-quarter (QoQ), while overall clicks declined 7.8 percent. Cost-per-click (CPC) rose across all devices.
This marks the first quarter The Search Agency has seen tablet CPCs outpace those of desktops on Google. Tablet CPCs rose 26 percent QoQ, coming in 1.7 percent higher than desktops.



Overall tablet clicks dropped 8 percent QoQ. Year-over-year, however, tablet clicks were up 62 percent. Bing continued it growth on tablets, increasing its share of clicks from 8.7 percent in Q1 to 10.9 percent in Q2.
Smartphone were the only device segment to see an increase in clicks QoQ, with a slight uptick of 1.6%. Smartphone ad spend leaped 25 percent for the quarter.
CPCs Rise Across Search Engines
Overall cost-per-click increased 17.3 percent QoQ and 10 percent YoY.
On Google, CPCs showed an increase across every type of device QoQ,  with the largest increase coming on tablets at 26 percent. Bing’s average CPC increased 18.9 percent YoY and remained relatively flat QoQ.

 

The Impact Of Enhanced Campaigns 

While reports from RKG and Covario concluded that enhanced campaigns have had little impact so far on CPCs, The Search Agency finds otherwise. The report says, “The rise in marketplace competition caused a spike in CPCs during Q2″.
The report also suggests that enhanced campaigns played a role in the relative decline in clicks QoQ compared to impressions: Declining CTR “may indicate a shift in matching or query mapping changes at the search engine level.” Google impressions rose 21.4 percent while clicks fell off 7.1 percent QoQ.
CTR dropped sharply in Google from last quarter — from 3.46 percent to 2.66 percent. However, it looks more like there was a spike in Q1.



Though less dramatic, Bing also saw click declines. Bing impressions rose 15.6 percent while clicks dropped 4.1 percent QoQ. Bing also saw an increase in CTR in Q1 and dropped back closer to Q4 levels last quarter.
Overall CTRs fell across devices in Q2. Desktop was off 22.6 percent QoQ, though just 3.9 percent YoY. Smartphone CTR fell 18.6 percent QoQ and 16.5 percent YoY. And Tablets saw the biggest QoQ drop, falling 21.1 percent, and 15.1 percent YoY.

Desktop Losing Share of Spend 

The Search Agency found desktop share of spend continued to fall, coming under 75 percent for the first time this quarter. Desktop 74.5 percent share of spend marks a 12.5 percent drop YoY and 2.5 percent dip QoQ.

Smartphone share of spend has risen 70.4 percent YoY and 12 percent QoQ. While tablets have increased their share of spend by 74.7 percent YOY and 4.2 percent QoQ.

 

Mobile Efficiencies Still High On Bing

While Google CPC efficiencies compared to desktop are falling for both smartphones (11.3 percent down from 14.1 percent in Q1) and tablets (now 1.7 percent higher than desktops), there are still sizeable discounts on Bing. Bing smartphone CPCs were 28.3 percent lower than desktop in Q2 (way up from 16 percent in Q1), and Bing tablet CPCs are off 7.7 percent compared to desktops. That’s up from 5.2 percent in Q1.

The Search Agency sees device adoption on Bing continuing to grow and suggests there is a particularly strong opportunity to add tablet campaign on Bing. Overall they suggest adopting a consistent mobile strategy to better understand consumer search behavior and increasing clickshare on tablets and smartphones.

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A Deep Dive Into Google’s Image Carousel And Knowledge Graph Results

Perform a Google search for [depeche mode members]. Not long ago, you’d get something that looked like the image below (plus a few images of a video to fill out the universal search results).

Today, the search results look like this:

 

Google is transitioning from universal search results to entity search results. In my example, Depeche Mode is a popular music band, and a band is an entity. Let’s break it down:

Appearance & Behavior

Let’s look at what happened to the appearance and behavior of images in Google’s SERPs with this transition.
Knowledge Graph Image Carousel
At the top, in fashionable black, Google gives us an image carousel. Because I searched for the members of Depeche Mode, Google displays pictures of each band member. Notice how each image is a clear head shot, and all are roughly the same size and dimensions. The pictures are served from gstatic.com, a Google-owned server. These images don’t exist on some website anymore — they’ve been appropriated by Google.
For example, the David Gahan image comes from FanPop. You can see it in Google’s image search results. However, Google does not link to the original or credit the source.

Image via FanPop.com

Back on Google, click on Dave Gahan’s photo in the carousel. Surprise! You don’t go to a website hosting this image. Instead, you are taken to Google search results for [Dave Gahan].
Take a moment to think about this. If I search for [depeche mode members], click on Dave Gahan’s picture, then click on a search result to your website, you will get an organic search referral from Google for the keyword “Dave Gahan” — not “Depeche Mode Members.”
Another thing to note is that the image carousel persists. Click on all the band members’ images — the carousel remains visible.
Image carousels aren’t only for band members. A number of different collection types are appearing.

• Musical Album Collections: Depeche Mode Albums
• Authors’ Books: Neil Gaiman Books
• Local Search: Seattle Coffee Shops
• Lists and Collections: Famous Jazz Composers

(To my eye, it appears some of the early lists and collections were human-curated.)
When you break it down, each type of collection is an entity waiting to get filled with relevant search results. The types of collections Google Search presents continues to expand.
Knowledge Graph Biography
To the right of the search results is the Knowledge Graph Biography. This is the oldest portion of the Knowledge Graph, released in May 2012. In the Depeche Mode example, you see:

• A biographical snippet, taken from Wikipedia and edited (one has to wonder if scores of Google interns spend time editing Wikipedia articles to make them more parse-able)
• Selected bullets: Origin, Albums, Lead Singers and Record Labels. These seem pretty consistent from artist to artist
• Upcoming Events
• Songs
• People Also Searched For

(Note: If I had just searched for [Depeche Mode], the Knowledge Graph Biography would have included a list of band members there as well, with no image carousel at the top of the SERP.)
Again, all the links in the biography area direct the user to more Google search results. Google seems determined to become your encyclopedia, fan magazine and touring schedule reference all in one. One has to wonder how long it will be before Google sells tickets right out of the Knowledge Graph!
If you click on an Upcoming Events link, the results pages are interesting. At the top (below the paid results and above the organic results) is a white panel with the venue location and, in small grey text, links to websites where you can purchase tickets. (Naturally, these are the type of links Google might come perilously close to finding suspicious on your website.)

Given Google’s prowess, I expect we will see these types of results attached to an increasing number of search queries.
The biographies have changed a bit since last year, mostly because Google backed off from trying to compile information from different websites into one field. For example, last year Google thought that, in addition to singing the oldies, crooner Andy Williams was a member of a punk band and a Christian rock band. The only result I can take issue with is that I’d have included Gary Numan as a related search before David Bowie, but I cannot blame Google for that one. (Remember, the opinions of the writers are their own.)
Organic Search Results
Let’s look at organic search results. They look a lot like Google’s original 10 blue links. Outside of a few sitelinks, there is nothing notable: no images, no local results, no videos.
This isn’t entirely consistent. Search for Seattle Coffee Shops, and you will see a map where the Depeche Mode biography sits. One result has a thumbnail — another, a review score. Search for Depeche Mode CDs, and you may see Google Shopping ads above the organic listings or the Knowledge Graph biography. The fact that there are no shopping ads for Depeche Mode Albums tells me Google has more tweaking to do.

Content Sources

The sources for Google content are trustworthy sites with machine readable content.

• The biographical information comes from Wikipedia.
• The tour dates come from the ticket sites. Again, click on a tour date and then look at the small, gray links just below the white rectangular result.
• The images come from Google Image Search. What’s interesting here is that the pictures in the image carousel do not come from the original search, but from searches for each band member’s name.
• What other people searched for comes from Google’s historical database.

Tips For Getting Links Alongside Entity Results

Queries that trigger Google Knowledge Graph have to pass a popularity threshold.

• Yes: The Fluid Albums
• Almost: Bum Kon Albums (Notice the site links from last.fm.)
• No: The Soul Merchants Albums

They also must match a type of collection that serves Knowledge Graph results of some type (local search, famous people, albums by artists, books by author, etc.).
The more popular the subject of an entity, the harder it will be to get a first page ranking. On the Depeche Mode Members page, the results include Wikipedia, the official Depeche Mode band site, Rolling Stone and The Sun. These are sites with high domain authority. To compete with the likes of these, you’d need:

• Citations: Get lots of links from webpages and social media to the content you want to rank.
• Domain Authority: You’ll need citations for many different pages on your site, not just a few viral articles.
• Domain Velocity: Sites that keep getting links over time, right up to the present, demonstrate current trust and popularity.
• Uniqueness: If the Knowledge Graph results include a biography, a Wikipedia page is likely to be in the organic search results. It’s also probable there are similar biographies all over the Internet. If they are in the press, there will be different versions of different stories. This is when Google likes to activate Query Deserves Diversity. If you need inspiration, look to the 2nd and 3rd page of the search results.
• A Serious Tone: As an observation, I don’t see a lot of comedy or satire in organic search results that accompany entities and Knowledge Graph.

Of course, the real question is whether or not you want to compete for inclusion in these particular organic search results. You may decide that are you better off trying elsewhere. After all, you’re competing with Google — and Google doesn’t seem to want visitors to click on the blue links.
If a carousel or Knowledge Graph appeared on a query you rank for, let me know. I’d like to know how it affected your traffic.

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Does Weather Affect Site Traffic & SEM Performance?

Omni-channel retail marketers with online sites and offline stores have often wondered about the effect that weather might have on their site traffic (which in turn would affect their paid search bidding strategies). There appear to be three competing hypotheses about weather affecting site traffic:

• Hypothesis #1: Site traffic is negatively correlated with weather quality — the better the weather, the lower the site traffic as people like to get out and buy products in store (substitution effect).

• Hypothesis #2: Weather has little to no effect on site traffic because surfing online shouldn’t depend much on weather (independent).

• Hypothesis #3: Site traffic is positively correlated with weather quality (synergistic).The theory here is that, when the weather is good, many people think about the store but start their searches online. A good fraction of these searches end with online purchases; as a result, weather quality is directly correlated with online site traffic.

The effect of weather on sales has been studied in the past. A paper from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors dealt with it at length and had several interesting findings. Most notably, it found that good weather had positive effects on sales for restaurants, durable goods, automotive and apparel, among other sectors.
Not surprisingly, food and gasoline sales are not affected by weather, as people need both regardless of weather. However, while this paper dealt with offline sales, it did not touch upon online sales and the online-offline substitution effect. It was this gap that motivated my analysis.
Before I get started, I want to highlight the fact that this is a very preliminary study with a very small sample size, both in terms of advertisers as well as DMAs studied. However, despite these limitations, the results are quite compelling.

Weather Affects Restaurant Searches

First, I looked at the connection between weather and restaurant searches by taking weekly weather data and mapping it with Google Trends data for “restaurants near me” in Chicago. This is an “obvious” case where we should see a connection between weather patterns and a localized search for restaurants.
Better weather would prompt more people to eat outside in restaurants, especially in a place where the weather patterns show large fluctuations. In a sense, this is our control where we should expect to see a connection.

The regression shows a clear connection between temperature and restaurant searches. Note that we have not controlled for other factors such as seasonality and holidays here. Despite that, the crude regression explains 51% of the variance with statistical significance (significant p values). This appears to validate the offline effect of temperature seen by the Fed researchers.

Weather Affects Retail White Goods & Construction Verticals

Next, I took the weekly website visitor and sales data for a set of retailers in the white goods and construction verticals and looked for patterns of site activity in 4 DMAs — three on the East Coast, where the season and temperatures vary significantly over the year, and one in Los Angeles, where the temperature and weather patterns are more stable.

Here, too, we can visually see a correlation (76%), even just looking at day-level of data without controlling for seasonality.
Using a dummy variable-based regression approach, I then investigated the role that weather conditions like snow, fog and rain play in website traffic and sales. Interestingly, in all East Coast DMAs, rain did not affect sales, but snow affected sales representing 11-15% of website sales. The graph below gives the intuition behind it.

Note that for days where the temperature was similar, the weeks with no snow (blue dots) produced more sales than when there was snow (red dots). For most East Coast DMAs, snow during the week lowered sales by between 10 and 15%. This effect disappeared in Los Angeles. Interestingly, rain did not have any effect in any of the DMAs investigated.

Key Takeaways

While this analysis is very preliminary and over a small sample size, it is quite apparent that temperature and adverse weather conditions (snow) do have an effect on website sales for some omni-channel marketers. Perhaps what is most interesting is that online and offline sales appear to be affected by weather the same way (i.e., online-offline sales appear to be synergistic).
Good weather motivates people to buy goods both online and offline. The data seem to validate the third hypothesis above, i.e., that many offline conversions begin with an online search, a fraction of which convert on site itself, another fraction of which end at the store.
Snow has a big effect on site sales. In the 4 DMAs that I investigated, snow had a statistically significant effect in reducing sales by 10-15% from the site’s average. Interestingly, rain did not affect site sales.
Finally, it is worth considering weather forecasts as part of your bidding strategy (for at least some verticals). This would especially be the case for snow days, when sales drop significantly.  However, it remains to be seen if a bidding strategy factoring in weather would have a significant impact on SEM performance.  If you have factored weather into your search engine bid management strategy, do share your story!
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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Google: Authorship Bug Affects “Very Few Sites,” Actively Working On A Fix

Google has confirmed that there are current issues with displaying authorship rich snippets on “very few sites.” A Google spokesperson told us “it’s something we’re actively working on” but that “it affects very few sites” on the Internet.
This is a topic I’ve personally been tracking very closely, as my own site is impacted by this very limited bug. About a month ago, I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that my own face is not showing up in the search results for that site and there are dozens of other complaints from webmasters. This has been going on for months.
Sites that had authorship rich snippets displaying in the Google search results since its inception, suddenly noticed Google has dropped their faces from the search results.
Yesterday, a major car information site on the internet, emailed us about the issue. They wrote to us that they have been having this issue since “early January,” like many of the other reports. They also told us that a Google representative told them directly that nothing is wrong on their side. This is the quote they sent us – although Google has not confirmed if it was authentic:

I’ve discussed with the team working on this and it doesn’t look like there is anything that can be done from your end at this point to expedite the process. Rest assured the team is aware of your request and is doing everything possible internally to make this work as quickly as seamlessly as possible, we try to support as many different site designs as possible, but we still have issues that are being worked out. Thanks for your continued patience, I will send another update as soon as I have one.

I did ask John Mueller of Google about this back in early June, you can see my question to him about one minute and fifty seconds into the video below. He basically said my code was fine and that it was algorithm related.
This issue has impacted the click-through rate of established and respected sites, such as that car site and my own, for about 6 months now. Google has said it is impacting “very few sites” but that they are “actively working on” a fix. Google however has not given us an estimate time for the fix to be rolled out.

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