There have been a lot of changes in search this year and some big changes in store. You have likely seen many of these, but since they tend to come out in a fairly ad hoc fashion, I am bringing together some of the bigger changes.
Bing and Yahoo! are breaking up their deal. While there is a lot of behind the scenes organizational stuff, for advertisers it means that Bing is no longer the exclusive provider of search ads on Yahoo!. However for the short term, Bing continues to provide most of the ads we see there.
Bing is now the provider of search ads on the AOL network, once served by Google. This should give Bing another small boost.
The bottom line is that if you have the resources and are not already doing so, you should explore Bing. I’ve seen it do really well on some programs vs Google, on par for others and not so well on a few. But, worth exploring.
Google… Lots of stuff here.
The Ads on the right rail are gone. We’ve seen some minor price pressure for the top of page positions. It hasn’t been too bad so far though. A little more explanation and early on impressions of this change here (https://fanaticallydigital.com/blog/2016/02/big-changes-coming-to-google-paid-search-results/)
Google Local / Map advertising has moved out of Search Partner status. This means advertisers can opt out of the Search Partners (Google.com only) and still show up on the maps as long as they have location extensions.
Google up and coming
Google is changing the text ad format. Currently there are 25 characters for the headline and 35 each for the two description lines. Pretty soon we will have 30 characters for the headline and a single block of 80 characters for the copy/ description. This means more copy rewriting ahead. Also, the display URL will be automatically pulled from the final URL, but we’ll be able to append sub paths.
Device bidding is coming back. For those who have been in the game a bit, you remember being able to create campaigns specifically for certain devices (mobile vs desktop). Google did away with that and incorporated bid adjustments instead. In the near future, we’ll be able to create device specific bids again. This will help for some programs that see very different behavior between devices.
While the above is not exhaustive, it does touch on some of the main changes so far this year. If you have any questions about it or other areas of digital marketing, please drop me a line…happy to talk.