All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 AR starts driving sales

🔍 AR starts driving sales

Jul 16, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, AR is starting to prove itself for retail.

Augmented reality has been incorporated into many retail apps in the past few years as well as in Snapchat, Pinterest and Google. Now, AR appears poised to start making a real impact on online sales. eBags told Greg Sterling that 3D-AR product features are generating much higher conversion rates. Ads like Google's 3D Swirl format, says Greg, will also help retailers bring "some of the 'physical experience' of products to digital." That's increasingly important during this time when consumers are doing more shopping online.

Google signaled that both responsive search ads and Smart Shopping campaigns aren't going away yesterday with new features rolling out for each of the automated campaign types.

Smart Shopping, the automated campaigns that run across a bunch of Google properties but don't give you any channel or query reporting, can now incorporate the "new customer" conversion value in conversion goals to help you optimize for net new customers. Smart Shopping ads are also now eligible to show annotations promoting free or fast shipping options. Google also previewed new ad formats for Smart Shopping that will come out later this year.

Responsive search ads. The image extensions beta is now officially open (you still need to contact a rep, though) for both RSAs and ETAs. And countdown ad customizers will soon be available for RSAs, marking the first time dynamic copy has been available in RSAs.

Before I go, a quick reminder that we'll be talking Shopify SEO this Friday at 1 p.m. ET on Live with Search Engine Land. Sign up here. And next week, tune in for our series on SEO for Developers. Check out the schedule and line up and get registered.

Read on for a Pro Tip on content writing that will resonate with audiences and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

How to strike a chord to develop campaigns that connect

Knowing what challenges your audiences face is only step one to developing content that connects. Step two is understanding how your customers feel about their challenges and utilizing effective emotional writing to strike a chord.

Show, Don't Tell. The easiest mistake to make when writing emotionally is to come out and broadcast that you're doing it. Don't tell the reader how they feel. Instead, imagine how they would prefer to feel and give them a taste of that.
Resonate, Don't Exploit. To prove a need for your product or service, you should evoke, not exploit, emotion in people. It's easy to exploit intense emotions of fear, anger, agitation in our audiences in order to sell. But it feels fake. Instead, show the reader you understand their emotions and maybe even share them.

Read more »

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Search Shorts

Crawl budget video and don't block 404s

Crawl Budget video from Google. The SEO myth busting series is out again and there is an outstanding video on crawl budget and Google SEO with Martin Splitt of Google and Alexis Sanders of Merkle. It covers topics like crawl demand, crawl rate, crawl frequency, server setup vs crawl budget, crawl budget & rendering and much more. You can watch it over here.

Do not block 404s. John Mueller of Google said it would be "a really bad idea which will cause all sorts of problems" if you automatically blocked Google from your 404 pages. He added "billions of 404 pages are crawled every day – it's a normal part of the web, it's the proper way to signal that a URL doesn't exist. That's not something you need to, or can, suppress."

Wear a mask. Google Maps is reminding users to wear a mask before going out.