🔍 So long, Gallery ads. Hello, Image extensions.

May 18, 2020

Good morning, search marketers, happy Monday.

Gallery ads, those big splashy ads with carousels of images, are sunset bound. Fair enough if you thought they'd already been put to pasture, but beta testers have been notified that their Gallery ads will stop serving beginning in August. Instead, Google Ads will focus on its other image beta test: image extensions, including dynamic image extensions. With a low barrier to set up and a similar treatment already showing in organic results, it's looking like this could finally be the image extensions iteration that makes it out of beta.

As for Gallery ads, they likely suffered from the friction involved in setting up new ad formats and from measurement challenges. The format lives on for automotive brands, however.

Local businesses are starting to see more customer reviews showing up in Google My Business. Google confirmed to us that it is "now publishing user reviews and photos in all countries and the vast majority of business categories." Google had temporarily disabled reviews in March as the coronavirus pandemic hit and the company was working with reduced staff. You should now see most review activity showing up in your GMB account.

Catch the replay of Friday's Live with Search Engine Land with Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling, Foursquare CEO David Shim and PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall. It was a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion about how marketers are using location insights to understand consumer behavior trends and activating audiences to predictions of what COVID recovery will look like based on current data trends.

Read on for a snapshot of travel CPCs from Microsoft Advertising's most recent search trend insights and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Indicators

Travel trends in search

Microsoft Advertising has been publishing search insights across a number of verticals to help marketers understand current and emerging behavior trends during this time. The travel sector has been among the hardest hit during the pandemic. In Microsoft's most recent snapshot, there are indications that some air travel and transportation & excursions advertisers are turning campaigns back on. We'll be watching if that trend holds, or if advertisers will pull back — as seen in the cruise subvertical at the end of April. You can access the COVID-19 insights hub for advertisers here.

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Search Shorts

Deindexed can be a relevancy issue

Deindexed pages, might be quality issue. Gary Illyes from Google said Google may remove your pages from its index if those pages are not high quality to save space in its index. It's a complex topic, but he wrote about it in more detail on Twitter.

Google My Business and core updates. Google Search Core updates do not impact the data in Google My Business said John Mueller of Google.

Translating developer docs. Lizzi Harvey from Google said it can take about two weeks from when an English Google developer document is published to be translated to other languages.

What's "next" in search marketing?

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