Top of the morning Search Marketer, is it still "hump day" when you keep forgetting what day of the week it is?
Experimenting with your ads may have just gotten easier on Microsoft's platform — the company has rolled out cookie-based experimentation, in which customers are shown, and continue to see, ads from either your experiment or the original campaign. When Microsoft first launched its experimentation feature last summer, it was search-based, meaning that the version of the ad customers saw might vary from session to session. This new feature should facilitate more accurate testing of creative and ad copy, but it may also take longer to obtain statistically significant comparison data than if you just ran search-based experiments.
It's been over six weeks since the pandemic was declared a national emergency, forcing the closure of more than 48,000 shopping establishments, 30,000 restaurants, and 24,000 spas and other beauty businesses, according to a new report from Yelp. The local business review platform likened the impact to "several hurricanes worth of local economic upheaval across the U.S." Widespread small business closures are sure to affect agencies, SaaS platforms, and the martech companies that serve them. Let's try to be cautiously optimistic — as states reopen, hopefully many of these SMBs will be able to reopen as well. Fingers crossed.
Stay-at-home orders also mean that customers aren't engaging with local businesses as much — requests for driving directions, site clicks, and phone calls via Google My Business have decreased significantly, according to data from Reputation.com. However, GMB is poised to emerge from COVID-19 as an even more important platform than it was pre-pandemic, says Search Engine Land Contributing Editor Greg Sterling, who argues that GMB, having been a lifeline for SMBs during COVID, will see wider adoption as we move past the crisis and that Google will introduce more integrations that blur the distinction between online and offline.
Everyone seems to be grappling with marketing priorities during these abnormal times: Should you focus on top-of-funnel awareness, even when it doesn't feel as measurable as performance-based campaigns? That's what Dana Tan, senior manager, global SEO for Under Armour, Amy Bishop, owner of Cultivative, and Michelle Morgan, director of client services for Clix Marketing will be discussing this Friday at 2 p.m. ET on Live with Search Engine Land. Greg Sterling returns to moderate the discussion on B2B and B2C content, commerce and which channels are performing best right now. We hope you'll join us!
We've got a Pro Tip for you below – a case study on how robots.txt files are handled by subdomain and protocol.
George Nguyen,
Associate Editor
