Article by Lisa Raehsler Learn about the paid search innovations, new platform features, and evolving privacy issues driving major changes in PPC strategy for 2022. 2022 looks promising for search marketers, particularly on the heels of great technical enhancements, new releases, and feature enhancements we’ve seen in the search marketing world and other paid ad platforms this year. Whether you are looking for optimizations to refresh your existing strategy or on the hunt for

Article by Justin Lugbill Despite recent Google Ads changes, marketers can still improve acquisition efficiency. Justin Lugbill shares the latest best practices for optimizing CPA. As Google Ads has matured, optimizing to decrease cost per acquisition (CPA) has gotten more complicated and left many marketers wondering: What tools do I have to reduce Google Ads CPA? What factors should I consider when optimizing CPA? Despite loosening definitions on keyword matching, increased

Article by Amy Bishop Google Ads has announced updates to the way that queries are matched to keywords. Here's what advertisers need to know! Google has announced changes to keyword matching, including a change that prefers the phrase and broad keywords which are identical to the query string. Google is also updating the matching process for queries that don’t have an identical keyword match. The Basis For This Change Earlier this year, Google announced that an exact match ke

Article by Justin Lugbill What are display ads? How do they work? How can you optimize them? Here's everything you need to know - Justin Lugbill explains. I used to run an ecommerce company that spent $40k monthly with Google and Microsoft Ads – primarily on search. And while I ran test after test to get prospecting-focused display ads to drive sales, it was all to no avail. Fast-forward to now (nearly a decade later) and display targeting and ad unit capabilities have improv

Article by Andrea Atzori The world of search and paid ads has never been busier, writes Andrea Atzori. It’s a hotly contested space where marketers need to do everything they can to inspire customers to choose their ad. Consumers value their privacy more than ever before, but they have also grown accustomed to ads that are hyper-relevant to them. Nurturing first-party customer data acquisition is of increasing urgency. But this can only happen if customers click on your ad in

Article by Shelley Walsh The top social media sites have seen plenty of movement in the the last few years. Facebook might still be dominant, but TikTok has seen the fastest growth of any social media platform. From launch only five years ago, the video-based platform is now fifth for most monthly active users (MAU). Meanwhile, Instagram has seen impressive growth and holds the number four position for MAU. This means for brands wanting to reach an audience, the choice of soc

Article by Carolyn Lyden Carolyn Lynden reports, Google hopes to help advertisers manage bid strategies and drive performance. Google is launching new features for Smart Bidding to help make automation more intuitive to search marketers’ needs and better cater to changes in each advertiser’s individual market. Top signals changes. Advertisers can now use top signals for search campaigns using Target ROAS and Maximize conversion value. “Currently, you can only view top signals

Article by Barry Schwartz Barry Schwartz reports that Google announced this morning the official launch of auto-applied Google Ads recommendations. The company is “rolling out the option to apply recommendations automatically.” This is an opt-in feature, and you can choose from over 17 recommendations to apply automatically within the Google Ads setting. Google Ads auto-apply recommendations. Google now allows advertisers to opt-in to apply a certain subset of recommendations

Article by Winston Burton Google and Microsoft Bing are the largest search engines that satisfy users' informational needs every day. Let's explore a detailed comparison of the two here. TABLE OF CONTENTS Google vs. Microsoft Bing Market Share Comparing Google vs. Microsoft Bing’s Functionality How Google & Microsoft Bing Differ in Size of Index and Crawling Differences in User Interface & Tools Microsoft Bing May Excel in Image Search Over Google How Microsoft Bing & Google

Article by Michelle Morgan Here's a walk through of ad targeting options for search, display, and remarketing campaigns and how they can be used to engage with potential customers. TABLE OF CONTENTS Search Targeting Display Targeting Contextual Targeting Audience Targeting Remarketing Demographics In the world of pay-per-click advertising, there are many different targeting options available, each designed to create a unique way for advertisers to reach their target audience.

Article by Susan Wenograd Modified broad match will be sunset, with phrase match taking over. Here's what this means for advertisers and how queries match to keywords. Google announced today what is potentially a large change for certain paid search managers: the broad match modified version of keywords will be going away. This change will start rolling out in two weeks. What’s Happening to Broad Match Modified? Phrase match will now expand to cover broad match modified insta

Article by Josh McCoy. A year-end audit is always a good idea. You will gain insight into improvements that need to be made. Here's how to do it right. As much as it didn’t seem possible, we’ve made it to the end of 2020. It’s been quite a “different” year for many of us as search marketers. Interesting challenges presented themselves with shrunken budgets for many, or even altered tactics to see success during this year’s darkest days. For a fortunate few, business actually

Article by Corey Morris. Make sure your PPC campaigns are set up for success. Learn the top factors that can hold back paid search performance and how to address them. Are your PPC campaigns performing at the highest level possible? Maybe. Or maybe not. It doesn’t matter what type of company you work with, their industry, or their size. There are many specific mistakes that impact your PPC success. This article will highlight nine such mistakes. Some of these PPC mistakes obv

Article by Jonathan Kagan. Relying on older PPC bid strategies and concepts may do more harm than good. Here are outdated approaches to avoid and some alternatives to try instead. You know those good old paid search strategies – the ones we have always relied on, feel evergreen, and will never “go the way of Old Yeller”? Well, the reality is, the bid strategies from as recent as 2018 often struggle to still remain valuable, cutting edge, and tip-top shape for today’s marketer

Article by Matt Southern. Google is expanding free shopping ads to more countries starting in mid-October. Google is making shopping ads free in more countries following the rollout of free shopping ads in the US earlier this year. Retailers will soon be able to run free listings in the Shopping tab across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The change is scheduled to take effect by mid-October. Google Shopping listings are free in the United States as of this past April. The de

Ginny Marvin reports. The impact will depend on what "significant" means, but advertisers are likely to lose visibility into at least some of the queries they pay for. Google has begun alerting advertisers that it will soon stop showing search queries that triggered their ads when there is not “significant” data. “We are updating the search terms report to only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users. As a result you may see fewer terms in your repor

Spotting the COVID-19 Impact with SEMrush Data According to Olga Andrienko, the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly had a significant effect on digital marketing trends this year. Its full impact is yet to be seen, but businesses have been forced to adapt to the changing circumstances on a weekly or even daily basis. At SEMrush, we have collected and analyzed recent data from over 2,000 of the world’s most visited ecommerce websites across multiple categories, including Fashion

Following the significant move of bringing free product listings to Google’s Shopping tab results in April, Google is starting to extend them into the main Search results, Ginny Marvin reports. The company announced Monday that the product listings in Search knowledge panels will now all be organic and included in Surfaces across Google inventory. “We wanted to make sure that as consumers make a dramatic shift to e-commerce that we’re doing everything we can to make it easy f

Brie E Anderson writes in her article that UTM codes can be extremely beneficial for tracking the success of your campaigns. Learn about them and their abilities in this guide. Have you ever been asked to add a random string of code to the end of your links? If so, it’s likely because you were working with an analytical nerd such as myself and they wanted to track traffic from whatever campaign or content you were publishing. That seems important, right? A Quick Background on

Thinking of diving into Facebook ads? Wondering what the common pitfalls are? In this article, you’ll discover three important considerations when starting your first Facebook ad campaign. #1: Commit to a Facebook Funnel Implementation All successful marketing starts with a clear strategy and Facebook advertising is no exception. With a strategy built around your available audience assets, you can execute campaigns that will deliver the best results for your business in the f