Good morning, search marketers, are you ready for 3D search results?
There's a whole lot of news coming out of Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference this week. Support for 3D objects and AR in search were among yesterday's splashiest announcements. Pinterest, Snapchat, Microsoft and Google — as well as many other retailers — already support the ability to see how a product looks in your space. With this support in search, consumers can view 3D objects in the results or overlay them in their homes or surrounding environment using AR. Google demoed this by showing a giant shark on stage instead of, say, a couch.
Googlebot now runs on open source Chromium, which means it will be able to crawl more websites without issues and access thousands of features that a modern browser can access.
Google also announced updates for Google Lens and Assistant. Duplex, the AI taskmaster, is extending to the web to assist users with completing tasks online, such as buying movie tickets.
New data from the IAB shows search still holds the biggest piece of the digital advertising pie in the U.S., but search advertising's share continues to get chipped away. The IAB reported U.S. search ad revenues accounted for 45.1% of digital ad revenues, down from 46% in 2017. Search spend did increase by 19% in 2018 (slightly faster than in 2017), to $48.4 billion. That's up from $40.6 billion in 2017. Mobile remains the primary growth driver — no surprise there. Video is the fastest growing format, per the report, which showed that overall U.S. digital ad revenues topped $100 billion for the first time last year.
In odd news, Google's running a test on broad queries such as "restaurants" in which it hides the search results and shows users the following message: ""Hmm… the results for your search don't seem very relevant." Hmm, indeed.
Lots more below including a Pro Tip reminder to review your custom labels in Google Ads, an SMX update (SMX Advanced is coming right up!) and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
