🔍 Early look at Google Ads customer value reporting, value rules

Mar 16, 2020

Good morning, search marketers.

Last week, the reality of coronavirus hit the U.S. This week is certain to be another trying one for businesses and employees having to adapt to quickly changing circumstances. Wherever you're reading this, know there is a supportive search community here for you.

If you were paying very close attention to the announcements from Google Marketing Live last year, you might recall hearing about customer value reporting and conversion value rules in Google Ads. Last month at SMX East, Google gave an early look at how these features are designed to work. They're still in beta, but the aim is to give advertisers more granular insights and flexibility to optimize for high-value conversions.

The proposal process can be a fraught one, particularly if you're being asked to produce highly involved reporting just to win the business. Google's recent video on hiring an SEO sparked frustration among some SEOs by suggesting we should be expected to deliver a technical SEO audit during the proposal phase. Here's why experienced SEOs say a technical SEO audit shouldn't be part of the proposal process.

Read on for e-commerce marketer Tony Verre's take on syndicating or customizing product content for your own site and your retailer partners. Our reader survey is also still open! Please take a quick moment to share your thoughts below.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

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SMX Takeaway

E-commerce product details on your site vs. retailer partners

"Standardizing and optimizing product content across retailers (with the same content via feeds) will provide a consistent and great user experience for the consumer, which is the most important aspect," explains SMX West speaker Tony Verre of Integer Group. "I have not seen Google penalize the direct-to-consumer website or retailer websites for near-identical content. But, if this is something that worries you, I also think it's acceptable to create a less-robust version for retailer syndication and create a more robust and optimized version for your DTC website."

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Search Shorts

Google search audio hangouts

Audio hangouts for search. Gary Illyes from Google said he may set up daily audio hangouts to talk about search. He shared some details on Twitter.

Unsearched pages. Does it hurt you to have pages on your web site that people do not search for? Google's John Mueller didn't really answer the question but he responded.

Site queries. Site-queries are always artificial, so I wouldn't make too many assumptions there, Mueller said.

Improve your SEO with new technical training at SMX Advanced

Don't miss the brand-new SEO for Developers track coming to Seattle June 8-10, featuring highly-technical sessions — many in live-coding format — focused on using code libraries and architecture models to develop applications that improve SEO.

Learn more »