Good morning Search Marketer. For the Americans among us, we hope you had a safe, relaxing Independence Day weekend.
Google is once again testing ads on local business profiles. So far, the third-party ads all appear to be connected to the businesses of the profiles they show up on (for example, a Groupon ad for a business, displayed on that same business' GMB profile). Tim Capper, who was the first to notice this recent test, points out that these ads may redirect an order that would otherwise go directly to a restaurant.
Businesses cannot currently opt-out or select the ads that appear on their profiles, but Google has said that the ability to customize online ordering preferences will roll out on GMB in the coming weeks. Last year, Google sent out a survey asking local businesses whether they'd be willing to pay to remove ads from their profiles, and this is already a benefit of Yelp's enhanced profiles — "In addition to revenue generated from clicks, Google may be contemplating something similar down the line," writes our own Greg Sterling.
If you're seeing curiously high cart abandonment rates, it may just be a bot. Google's web crawler has been adding products to e-commerce site shopping carts, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Google says it does this to ensure the pricing on product pages is reflected when a user adds that product to their cart. Sellers may not be aware, but they opt into it by uploading their product feeds into Google Merchant Center. Unfortunately, beyond regulating their crawl rate using their robots.txt file, there's nothing merchants can do about it if they want their products to display in Google Shopping and Surfaces across Google.
We've still got some time before Google's Top Stories carousel opens up to non-AMP pages in 2021, but it's not too early to start preparing for it: BuzzFeed's Matt Dorville recommends that publishers evaluate their mobile UX, revenue model, internal bandwidth and, after the restriction lifts, keep an eye on competitors' visibility and test their own visibility without AMP to formulate the right strategy for their organization.
If you're running Facebook ads in the U.S., be sure to read Simon Poulton's piece about how Facebook is handling California user data and how that might affect your business. Keep on reading, your daily Search Shorts, and more, are just a scroll away.
George Nguyen,
Editor
