🔍 eCPC bidding gets a nod from Shopping experts

May 26, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, how have your own digital shopping behaviors changed?

There is so much happening in retail and shopping right now, I'd argue that it's worth paying attention to at a high level even if you're not working in that world.

On Friday, Kirk Williams of ZATO and Mike Ryan of Smart Ecommerce and I discussed the two biggest things happening in Google Shopping: Smart Shopping Campaigns and the shift to include free listings in Google Shopping. At a high level, we talked about what's driving Google's approach to both and what they mean for marketers.

On a practical level, we talked about bidding strategies, getting the most out of Google Merchant Center and how to track traffic from Surfaces across Google. When it comes to launching a new traditional Shopping campaign, both said manual eCPC bidding is still a good way to start. Watch the full episode here.

The other big news in digital commerce marketing is Facebook Shops. To dig into the news, I'm thrilled to host Facebook ads specialist Gil David, founder of Run DMG and Florian Litterst of Adventure.de, a Facebook and Instagram advertising whiz, on a special Wednesday edition of Live with Search Engine Land. We're going to dive into what it is, what it means for brands and businesses and a whole lot more tomorrow at 12:00 pm EST. Visit Search Engine Land today to register!

Keep reading for an SEO Pro Tip for driving traffic from image search and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Pro Tip

Don't forget your images

Last week, we published our new Shopify SEO guide, and I asked readers to send in their own tips for inclusion. We've received several and most are applicable beyond Shopify. Mark Lemon from CO2Meter, which sells CO2 measurement solutions, wrote to share the success he's seen from the simple act of optimizing image file names with product keywords.

"We're in B2B and name our images according to product search terms," he says, adding that 10% of the company's customers come to the site via Google Images.

We'll be adding Mark's #protip to the guide along with the others we've received. To share yours, email us at editors@thirddoormedia.com.

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Search Shorts

COVID poll, crawling and feeding GoogleBot

Google's COVID SEO Twitter poll. Gary Illyes form Google added a few polls on Twitter for SEOs to fill out related to how COVID-19 impacted their work.

Google crawls from the US. Just an SEO FYI, GoogleBot crawls from the US, so if you want Google to find your content properly, make sure it is accessible via the US.

Feeding Google too much. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter sometimes feeding Google too many pages can not work out too well. John said, "if anything, submitting all search pages make crawling & indexing significantly harder for large sites. IMO this is where smaller sites can prioritize much better than larger ones can."

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