share tweet share pin it e-mail share Google has opened up its shopping ads to external providers and there is greatly increased competition for product ads. Around one third of ads in the British, German and French search results are provided by external services, Searchmetrics’ 2018 Google Shopping Study reveals. However, traditional product and price comparison portals are hardly found in these ads. Most are occupied by marketing agencies who bid for ads on behalf of online shops. Now, several large comparison sites, including Idealo and Comparado, have made a complaint to the European Commission. Their position is that Google Shopping’s distribution of ads is no fairer than before and they demand that the EU take further measures against Google. Shopping Study 2018 Google Shopping today: The competitive landscape In June 2017, the European Commission found that Google had been abusing its market dominance in the area of shopping ads, and … [Read more...] about Google Shopping 2018: Fake Competition?
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Is This “Just” Another Arbitrage Opportunity?
I love organic search. The idea of building up from nothing to create something which is fairly sustainable and eventually has its own momentum behind it is an awesome feeling. But you have to start somewhere. Adding value is a great thing to say, but the phrase is often meaningless. Even if you do something that adds value to the web then many people will start cloning it right away, and if they have more distribution than you do, they will take ownership of your idea. This can even happen to established reputable webmasters with a decade of experience! If your goal is to keep adding value and hope that someone eventually notices, you are probably in for a sad surprise. More likely than not the person who notices and cares the most will compete against you. The business world is full of fake investors, fake friends, fake partners, and publicity stunts. That perhaps sounds cynical, but it is a reflection of how the web works. In other words, creating value by itself is a hollow and … [Read more...] about Is This “Just” Another Arbitrage Opportunity?
How To Manage Bids For AdWords Shopping Ads
Last month, I covered the basics of how Shopping campaigns in AdWords differ from Search campaigns. The key finding I had was that, with Search, you have to add keywords to target more queries. In Shopping, all queries that match your products are targeted by default, and one of the main reasons to divide products into Product Groups is to get more control over bids. This month, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about managing bids for AdWords Shopping ads. Bidding In Shopping Campaigns All bidding in Shopping Campaigns is done at the lowest Product Group level — so while ad groups in Shopping campaigns have a default bid, those serve no useful purpose. I’m not sure why Google kept ad group bids in Shopping campaigns… perhaps simply because they wanted to leverage the existing AdWords infrastructure. Default ad group bids in Shopping campaigns don’t do anything other than provide a starting CPC value for new product groups created in the ad group. … [Read more...] about How To Manage Bids For AdWords Shopping Ads
How Google is tackling fake news, and why it should not do it alone
Following the US election and Brexit, increased focus is being placed on how social networks and search engines can avoid showing “fake news” to users. However, this is a battle that search engines cannot — and more fundamentally, should not — fight alone. With search engines providing a key way people consume information, it is obviously problematic if they can both decide what the truth is and label content as the truth. This power might not be abused now, but there is no guarantee of the safe governance of such organizations in the future. Here are five key ways Google can deal (or already is dealing) with fake news right now. They are: Manually reviewing websites Algorithmically demoting fake news Removing incentives to create fake news Signaling when content has been fact-checked Funding fact-checking organizations 1. Manually reviewing websites Google does have the power to determine who does and does not appear in their various listings. To appear in … [Read more...] about How Google is tackling fake news, and why it should not do it alone
The fake information epidemic and how it will hurt local search in 2017
Fake news and its influence on the election dominated headlines for weeks as fabricated news reports went viral and the election results shocked the nation. But fake news is just one tentacle of a troubling and growing trend of fake media content. The headlines simply brought to light what is a much wider problem: the ease and prevalence with which false online information is used to manipulate behavior. The manipulation can be of consumer behavior, business behavior or even the behavior of software triggered by false information fed into its system. Scam artists are strongly motivated to take advantage — recent reports cite Russian hackers who stole up to $5 million a day in advertising revenue by posing as fake users in a scheme tagged by the name “Methbot.” The impact on marketers is particularly hard. As consumers search for information to help make purchase decisions, uncertainty about the veracity of the information they receive impacts the effectiveness of … [Read more...] about The fake information epidemic and how it will hurt local search in 2017