🔍 Google experiments with new voice match feature for shopping

May 28, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, do you know your vitals?

You'll find them in a new report. The Core Web Vitals report has replaced the Speed report in Google Search Console. It reports a new set of metrics that measure loading performance, interactivity and visual stability, all of which point to user experience. The metrics will also be surfaced across all Google tools.

SMB support via GMB. Searches for "how to help small businesses" increased by more than 700% in March compared to February, Google said yesterday. The company that announced a number of new features are now rolling out broadly to help support local businesses survive COVID-19. For one, support links are expanding to 18 more countries to allow business owners to add donation and gift card links to Google My Business profiles, through Google partnerships with PayPal and GoFundMe. For gift cards, Google is working with Square, Toast, Clover and Vagaro.

Google Ads SMB credits are rolling out: Eligible advertisers in New Zealand are the lucky initial recipients of Google Ads credits. Designed to help SMB advertisers re-engage customers in the coming months, the credits began showing up in qualifying New Zealand advertiser accounts yesterday. The program will roll out globally over the coming weeks with credits of up to $1,000 US.

Discovery campaigns available to all: You should now have access to Discovery campaigns in Google Ads. The social-style ads run across the Discover Feed, YouTube Home Page and Watch Now and Gmail Social and Promotions tabs to reach up to 2.9 billion people. (Notably, Facebook touts an audience of 2.99 billion across its family of apps.) Google is taking things slowly — there's only one ad slot on Discover now — but expect these to ramp up as more advertisers get the hang of running social media-adapted creatives through Google Ads. Time for paid search and social teams to get cozier.

Keep reading for a look Pro Tip on Facebook Marketplace for B2C businesses and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Pro Tip

A B2C opportunity awaits on Facebook Marketplace

"As the Facebook Marketplace grew in popularity, Facebook added new features, like the ability to process a transaction through checkout, and the option to offer shipping. Now, Facebook Marketplace is open to US-based businesses selling new products," explains Brian Roizen of Feedonomics.

"If you already use data feeds to list ads on Facebook or Google Shopping, then transitioning to Facebook Marketplace is fairly simple. Typically, the main additional requirement for selling on a marketplace is that you include your inventory quantities in your feed. It's important to create inventory rules that prevent you from overselling products that exist on multiple marketplaces."

"If you are somebody who already runs ads on Facebook, note that Facebook Marketplace will need to use your child-level SKU as the product identifier. This is because a successful order integration requires a child-level SKU to be associated with a customer's order. When it comes to product ads, merchants may often choose to use parent-level IDs for Pixel tracking—this makes sense when you want to show a display ad for a parent product, instead of showing an ad for every size of a product. However, when listing your products on a marketplace, using child-level product identifiers is the only way to make sure your order integration links to the correct product data for fulfillment."

Learn more »

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Search Shorts

Cloaking your hreflang tags? Is there an SEO friendly font?

Cloaking hreflang. Google's John Mueller said in a Reddit thread that cloaking your hreflang won't lead to a Google penalty but it is highly discouraged.

SEO friendly fonts. There really is no such thing as an SEO friendly font. Mueller said on Twitter, "the choice of font doesn't matter for SEO."

SEO session in web.dev live. There will be a couple JavaScript SEO related sessions in the web.dev live event on June 30th. You can learn more about this on Twitter.

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