Welcome to ‘What Happened in Search’.
Packed full of the week’s digital search news each Friday, this week’s edition features click-to-call, 2014’s bad ads and Twitter’s pipeline.
BING ADS’ NEW INITIATIVES
In a blog post this week, Bing Ads’ head of product marketing, Steve Sirich, reviewed last year’s platform updates and discussed new initiatives for 2015. In advance of the blog post release, Sirich shared some interesting news on upcoming features, including native ads on MSN.com.
Sirich said Bing Ads’ role at Microsoft is evolving to focus more on supporting consumer productivity.
$4BN SPEND ON CLICK-TO-CALL
This week, call analytics platform Marchex released a report arguing that mobile call extensions were a roughly $4 billion revenue driver for Google (and Bing) in 2014. However, the company says click-to-call ads are a “blind spot” for marketers because there’s no keyword attribution available.
Accordingly, click-to-call ads are often inefficient currently. Based on Google statements and data, Marchex projects that in 2015 there will be more than a billion calls generated by click-to-call ads in mobile search in the US market.
2014 ‘BAD ADS’ REPORT
Google shut off more than 524 million ads in 2014 for using “trick to click” tactics and promoting counterfeit goods, malware and spyware among other violations of its advertising policies, according to its annual Bad Ads report. That’s up from the more than 350 million ads disabled by the online advertising giant in 2013.
More than 33,000 merchants were banned from advertising on Google Shopping for ad policy violations.
The overall number of bad advertisers banned from Google’s ad systems did see another annual drop from around 270,000 in 2013 to some 214,000 in 2014. In 2012 that number was over 800,000. At the time, Mike Hochberg, former director of ads engineering, said of the sharp decline, “In part, we attribute this decline to scammers — counterfeiters, for example — being thwarted by our safety screens and searching for less-secure targets”.
Of the ad policy violations Google itemises, “trick to click approaches” accounted for the largest percentage of problem ads
CROSS-PLATFORM PRODUCTIVITY
SearchEngineLand columnist John Cosley argues that our lives don’t fit in a box, and we should apply this attitude to our approach to search. Search is evolving, which means finding what you need requires more than a search box and list of links.
Consumers aren’t just searching, they are seamlessly navigating between channels and devices. What’s more, evolving inputs such as voice search are creating new scenarios; innovative user signals are building connections that bring in more personally relevant information.
All of these new search developments are enabled by the significant shift to mobile with smartphone adoption. Worldwide, IDC Mobile phone tracker reports that smartphones are outselling PCs 3:1, and they predict that this will grow to over 5:1 by 2017. The stage is set for massive disruption – search included.
TWITTER GIVES GOOGLE ACCESS TO PIPELINE
Three and a half years after cutting off the flow, Twitter is turning its tweet pipeline back on for Google.
On Wednesday night, Bloomsberg Business reported that Twitter has reached a deal with the search giant to provide access to Twitter’s firehose data stream. The deal will give Google the ability to index tweets immediately after they are posted and will make tweets easier to find on the search engine.
WEEKLY VIDEO
Basic SEO Questions Answered
There are certain questions about SEO that appear frequently, and it’s often easy to assume an answer that isn’t exactly right. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Moz Blog’s Rand tackles three of them.
