Industry News

Google is testing showing local ads in the local pack without review stars. Normally you'd see review stars for the sponsored results in the local pack, but in some cases, Google is testing removing the reviews from the sponsored results in the local pack.

Using the "validate fix" button within Google Search Console to communicate to Google that you fixed an issue, does not signal to Google to expedite anything on its end. It just a reporting mechanism for you to track when Google recrawls the issue and for you to see if it was "fixed" according to Google or not but it does not speed anything up.

Google has updated one of its help documents to specifically say that ad scheduling isn't compatible campaigns that use Smart Bidding. The previous version of that page said, "Ad scheduling is not compatible with both Smart Shopping campaigns and App campaigns." This change to the help document is causing a lot of confusion but in all honesty, likely means nothing has changed.

Google Ads is testing allowing advertisers to pause, enable and/or remove conversion assets on the asset group level for Performance Max campaigns. Some advertisers are able to enable/pause/remove individual conversions within their Google Ads accounts.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Microsoft is trying to trick Bing users to thinking they are using Google...

Google now added the new 24-hour hourly data from the performance report in Google Search Console to the export functionally. So now you can export hourly data, the most recent data, from Google Search Console's performance report.

Google Ads SPN, search partner network, has a 37% lower ROAS, return on ad spend, for shopping campaigns on Google Ads when compared to Google Search ads, directly. Mike Ryan wrote this on LinkedIn, saying, "SPN is a budget buy. It doesn't convert as well, but it also doesn't cost as much. I crunched the numbers for you, and the Shopping via SPN has a ROAS 37% lower than Google Search."

Google has added a new attribute to its vehicle ads product attributes. The new attribute is [date_first_registered], the date of when the vehicle had its first registration date with the public authorities or government.

Google is testing new search refinement options to let users expand their queries for the people also ask and people also search sections of the search results. We've seen numerous variations of this over the years but here are new ones.

About a month ago, a reader sent me a screenshot of Bing showing this weird search box on its page after you search for Google. I thought it was some weird Microsoft Rewards promotion and took it at that and moved on. I was wrong, tons of publications are now saying this is Microsoft's way of tricking Bing users to thinking they are using Google Search.