🔍 Google's latest acquisition helps small retailers get product data online

Jan 15, 2020

Good morning search marketers, have you heard of Pointy?

Google has made a very interesting acquisition, scooping up Pointy to bring more SMB store inventory online. Pointy makes a hardware device that connects to a store's POS scanner to capture product data that can be pushed out into paid and organic search results, creating pages for each store and product that can be optimized to rank for product searches. It's easy to see the appeal for Google. The data can enhance organic results for local product search and make Local Inventory Ads more accessible to smaller retailers.

If you're running Target ROAS campaigns in Google, you'll now see the bid simulator tool available at the portfolio and ad group levels. And, the budget simulator tool is now available for campaigns using Maximize Clicks and Maximize Conversions smart bidding strategies. You'll see the simulator icon if the system has recommended budget changes. The simulators show projected impact based on your auction data from the past seven days.

How are your rankings looking? Did you see fluctuations after Monday's Google Core Update rolled out?

Read on for a Pro Tip from Brad Geddes on when SKAGs might make sense and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

Here's when a SKAG structure makes sense

"An ad group is a collection of keywords, ads and landing pages that all go together to lead a user from search intent to conversion. If there is a keyword that needs a different ad than another keyword in the same ad group, then you need to split those keywords into different ad groups," explains SMX speaker Brad Geddes of AdAlysis. "If you create ad groups by match types and use the exact same landing pages and ads in all of those ad groups, then there isn't any advantage to that structure over just putting all those keywords with their various match types into the same ad group. There are some exceptions, such as your bid technology only does ad group level bidding and you want to bid differently by match types. Or you want to watch a few brand terms closely and thus split them out by match types for just a handful of terms."

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3 Easy steps to complete your annual PPC checkup

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Buck up, search marketers! 2020 is here and those who want to dominate search marketing need to start the year on the healthiest footing possible. Great planning and powerhouse strategies require deep analysis of what has been working and what hasn't. You need to identify early signs of problems, know where opportunities exist, and be even more crisp at keeping key stakeholders posted about how your hard work is ensuring the overall health of their campaigns.

Use these techniques to make sure your PPC accounts are in great shape all year long.

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Search Shorts

Google's core update is big.

Google core update is big. It is super early but that Google January 2020 core update is live and the early chatter in the industry indicates this is a big one.

URL Inspection tool outage. The other night Google had an outage with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. It is now fixed.

GoogleBot name. Some are seeing the new GoogleBot user agent name but, as for me [Barry Schwartz], I am still seeing the old name for the vast majority of hits.

SEMPO changes. It looks like the Digital Analytics Association is taking over SEMPO, there has to be a vote, but it looks like this will happen.

Ready For Actionable Search Marketing Tactics?

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