🔍 Google Ads conversion bug | Holiday success with small budgets

Nov 25, 2019

Good morning search marketers, say hello to pinball scanning,

All those extra features — knowledge panels, image carousels, featured snippets, ad carousels, local packs, you get the idea — are changing the way users navigate the search results. A very interesting new eye-tracking and UX study shows how users now take a "pinball" patterned approach to the SERPs and examines what these changes mean for marketers.

Google Ads suffered another reporting bug, this time causing conversions to be overreported from November 11 – 20. Google was working on a fix to restore the reporting data late last week. Note that the company said smart bidding wasn't impacted during this period, just the conversion data reported in the UI and via the APIs and Scripts. Still, not ideal with the crunch time of Black Friday nearly upon us.

On the handy side, Google Ads now offers "top signals" reporting to see the signals that are most and least likely to drive conversions in your portfolio bid strategies. It will report device types, keywords, time of day and other signals. You may see insights that can inform your other marketing efforts as well.

Read on for a Pro Tip from Amalia Fowler on how accounts with small budgets can get the most out of their holiday campaigns and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

For low budget accounts, focus on proven tactics

"The unique constraints that small businesses face with advertising carry over to the holiday season, which is why knowing what you're measuring and being intentional with your budget is so important," explains Amalia Fowler of Snaptech Marketing. "One of the best ways to ensure that you don't spend all your budget is focusing on smaller audiences that you hypothesize will drive revenue. If you have a limited budget for the season, focus spend on proven remarketing and email lists. This is especially important during the sale periods, where customers who know you and have previously engaged with your business are more likely to purchase. This is a great way to approach Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You can also use lookalike audiences of people who have purchased in past years to narrow down your targeting for top of funnel campaigns."

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Search Shorts

Google search ranking tremors, indexing bug and negative SEO.

Tremors all week in Google. Since last Friday, we've been seeing insane Google search tremors — that's when the search results are volatile. It was a busy, busy week.

No indexing limit. Google's John Mueller said there is no limit to the number of pages Google can index on your web site.

Meta tag bug. Google fixed a bug with the max-image-preview tag where adding the value "none" would cause the page not to be indexed.

No, not negative SEO. Google's John Mueller looked at a specific claim of negative SEO and said, "FWIW looking at the site, I don't see any negative SEO effects there".

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