🔍 How to keep tabs on close variants matching

Dec 02, 2019

Good morning search marketers, happy Cyber Monday!

It's hard to keep up with all the changes in search. For agencies, it's important to speak with clients about how those changes may impact their performance and what the agency team is doing in response to those changes, said Andrea Cruz Lopez, digital marketing manager at digital marketing agency KoMarketing, when she sat down with Barry Schwartz. Andrea talked specifically about the close variants changes and keeping your ad spend focused where you want it. Watch the full interview with Andrea (she speaks three languages!) here.

Speaking of match types, at SMX East Brad Geddes dove into several problematic examples of Google's close variants matching and ways that search marketers can evaluate their close variants performance, use Levenshtein Distance to identify problems and employ pivot tables to locate duplicate search terms. Finally, Brad laid out a new search term workflow to use when examining your Search Terms reports.

ICYMI, Google had a bit of a SNAFU to clean up with several questionable Shopping ads popping up on search results for [Christmas]. In fairly short order, the search giant demonetized the page to make it safe for all eyes. It was a quick reminder about how and when Google monetizes queries, match types and Ad Rank thresholds all wrapped up in an awkwardly tied bow.

Read on for a Pro Tip on evaluating your landing pages and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

Is my website (or landing page) a good fit for my traffic?

"Paid search marketing is intent-based marketing. When someone searches for something on Google or Bing and clicks on your ad, they're actively looking for a solution to a problem…a problem they think your business can help them with," explains Jacob Baadsgaard of Disruptive Advertising. "Their click is an act of faith in your business and the page they land on after clicking shows them whether or not their faith was justified. If your landing page or website meets their expectations, a decent percentage of people should convert. If not, they'll leave. If you find yourself in that situation, you may want to take a hard look at the page you're sending traffic to. You may need to rethink your page and site experience to bring it into closer alignment with the expectations of your traffic."

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Search Shorts

It's not just about links with the Google updates...

Google November algorithm update. In a recent video from John Mueller of Google, he hinted that the November algorithmic updates probably aren't much about links and, yes, you should clean up your links, but also look at the site as a whole.

It's impossible. Google's John Mueller said it is impossible for Google to index the whole entire web.

GoogleBot & AdBot are different. Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter that "Adsbots have their own rules that may be different from [the] main googlebot."

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