🔍 Duplex-powered transactions come to the web | Google Ads intros CCPA compliance

Nov 22, 2019

Good morning, search marketers, are you ready for Google to own the transaction?

Google is enabling transactions on the web through Assistant using Duplex technology. Let's break that down. Duplex is Google's "virtual concierge service" that users can already use in the Google app using the Assistant to make reservations, book car rentals and, as of yesterday, buy movie tickets. Now, that's coming to the web. Snappily named "Duplex on the web" (Google kills it with feature names), it's one more example of Google's efforts to reduce transactional friction after the search by powering (controlling) the process.

For businesses that are going to be impacted by CCPA, California's data privacy regulation set to take effect January 1, Google has introduced "restricted data processing". CCPA, in part, will enable users to tell businesses not to sell their data by clicking on opt-out links on website homepages. Advertisers that enable restricted data processing in Google Ads will find that features like adding users to remarketing lists and similar audience seed lists will not be available.

A quick reminder to take our Amazon Advertising survey. Just 10 minutes of your time, and you could win a ticket to SMX. And if you're interested in speaking at SMX West this February in San Jose, CA, check out the agenda, and submit your pitch here!

Keep reading to learn about a script to help keep you from spending holiday budget on out of stock items.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

Pause out of stock products with this Google Ads Script

"Black Friday and the busy shopping season is rapidly approaching and with the fast-moving environment, products rapidly go out stock, often with ads still running resulting in wasted budget," explains Wesley Parker of Clicteq. "With large inventories, it's almost impossible to keep on top of pausing ads to out of stock products manually. But we have a Google Ads script that runs hourly and automatically pauses ads that are pointing towards products out of stock on Shopify."

Get the script »

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Search Shorts

Tabbed content, noindexing and more.

Tabbed content. Google's John Mueller explains that if the content is "loaded in the HTML and can be made visible to users, that's fine. It's problematic if the tab content only loads when you click on the tab".

Noindex workaround. Getting Google to crawl your page fast to discover the noindex tag you added to your page can be confusing. Here is some advice from Google's John Mueller.

Congrats. A big congratulations to Arianne Donoghue for being awarded the UK search personality of the year award by the UK Search Awards.

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