Good morning, search marketers, happy Monday.
I'm in New York for Advertising Week and will be reporting from there for the next couple of days. Send me a tweet if you're in the area @ginnymarvin.
Are you capturing store visit conversions in your Google Ads campaigns? Now, foot traffic data can be used in smart bidding strategies for Search and Shopping campaigns. Until now, smart bidding strategies could only optimize with and for online conversions. Store visits can be enabled for smart bidding at the account level across Search and Shopping campaigns, but you can also test it at the campaign level for Search campaigns. To activate it on individual Shopping campaigns, you'll need to contact your rep.
Whether you sell products or a service, you have felt the pressure to have good reviews, and plenty of them, across a host of digital platforms. In TripAdvisor's first transparency report on reviews on the platform, the company reported just over 2% of submitted reviews were fake in 2018. Of that, most were blocked before being published.
TripAdvisor said 91% of inauthentic reviews were biased positive reviews, while 6% were biased negative reviews. Just 3% were paid reviews.
Fraudulent reviews erode consumer trust and hurt businesses. Will other platforms such as Google and Amazon follow TripAdvisor's lead in shining a spotlight on their own review spam tactics?
Read on for a Pro Tip from Andy Taylor on managing the proliferation of close variants.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
