🔍 Retailer spend climbs on Google, Amazon this holiday

Dec 10, 2019

Good morning search marketers, did your holiday PPC budgets increase?

Advertisers spent 32% more on Google Shopping ads and 50% more on Amazon Sponsored Products Ads between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday this year than last, according to an analysis of Tinuiti retail clients put together by the agency.

That increase on Google Shopping came even in the face of more competition from Amazon, which significantly increased its own spend on Google Shopping. Tinuiti found that Amazon's impression share on Google Shopping was 87% higher this Black Friday than a year ago.

Google Maps announced two privacy-related updates Monday. The first: Incognito mode is rolling out to Google Maps for iOS now. Already available for Android, when users have Incognito mode enabled, their search and navigation history isn't saved or used for future personalization such as recommendations. The second: Bulk delete for Timeline will be released in Google Maps for Android next month. When Location History is on, users can save and share places and routes from "Your Timeline." Now, users will be able to delete all of that activity from Timeline and Location History in bulk. The marketing impact from these changes is likely to be minimal, however.

Read on for a Pro Tip on 301s and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

A quick optimization win: Remove 301 redirect chains

"When creating a redirect, have a single 301 redirect point directly to the final location. Redirect chains happen when websites migrate to SSL without checking that all previous URLs end in a single step to the HTTPS version," cautions Chris Gregory of DAGMAR Marketing. "When the original URL redirects to the secure URL, but you also want the non-www as canonical, it has to redirect again. This can lead to loss of link equity, create crawl problems for search engine bots, and affect page speed and server resources. The easiest way to remedy a 301 redirect chain is through your website's host or download a redirect plugin."

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Search Shorts

Animations, pagination and ad labels.

Animations. Martin Splitt from Google said it can handle animations fine for rendering, so no worries.

New pagination guidelines. Google may be working on providing new pagination guidelines since rel=prev/next is no longer supported, according to Igal Stolpner, who was at the Google conference in Tel Aviv.

Local black ad label. We know the black "ad" label now appears on the Google mobile search results, but Google has been testing them on desktop, too. And the way they look on the desktop local ads is pretty confusing according to Glenn Gabe.

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