🔍 E-commerce explodes with nearly 45% growth in Q2

Aug 20, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, I knew I forgot something yesterday.

Google went public exactly 16 years (and one day!) ago. Then just a five-year-old company, its IPO took place on August 19, 2004. Google offered 19,605,052 shares at $85 a piece, and it was valued at more than $23 billion. At that point, it claimed about 40% of the domestic search market.

For comparison, Alphabet shares floated around $1,555 per share yesterday, and, while figuring out its exact value isn't as straightforward as the company has branched out (YouTube, Android, etc.), it's market cap exceeded $1 trillion in January. Love it or hate it, Google is a linchpin in our industry, and we've staked the success of our brands and clients, as well as our own livelihoods, on its decisions.

As retail sales have slowed overall, e-commerce has gained momentum, fueled in no small part by consumer necessity and the ongoing pandemic. E-commerce spending as a percentage of total retail grew from 11.8% in Q1 to 16.1% in Q2. For comparison, online shopping growth for Q1 was 14.8% YoY — in Q2, it surged to 44.5%. "It's clear that Q4 will be another huge quarter for e-commerce," writes Contributing Editor Greg Sterling, "Retailers and brands should be preparing now and operating under the assumption that people will go online first before they go to any stores."

And, Microsoft Advertising Editor has been updated with two potentially timesaving features: AI-powered recommendations, which launched as a closed beta in November but are now available globally, can include suggestions for bid optimizations, new keywords to add, and fixes for ad groups that are missing ads or keywords. And, campaign-level audience targeting, which was previously only accessible in Microsoft Advertising's online interface, can now be applied within the Editor.

Take care and have a great day!

George Nguyen,
Editor

Chatter

Explicit content causes Google to pause header image experiment

Google was briefly testing background header images for search results based on query. We were able to replicate this yesterday on Chrome mobile using various queries that included the word "idea" (e.g., "creative ideas," "flower ideas," "ideas for Christmas"). "We're always testing new ways to improve the Search experience and make it more helpful, modern and delightful to use," a Google spokesperson told us.

However, the search engine has now hit the brakes on this experiment: "We don't intend for any headers to be triggering for suggestive topics," Google's Danny Sullivan said after a nude image appeared in the header as people tested search terms to see if they could trigger something racy, "But given that some were, we're pausing the experiment to investigate. Also, headers shouldn't be explicit or have nudity. We'll check on that, too."

Tip of the hat to Yvo Schaap, who first spotted this *air quotes* "feature."

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Search Shorts

COVID-19 resources, header attributes and Doodles.

Market finder COVID-19 resource. Google Ads announced that Market Finder has a nice COVID-19 resource for businesses and advertisers.

Mixed up header elements. Are you using your header elements and attributes wrong? It doesn't really matter from a search point of view. Gary Illyes from Google wrote on Twitter "it's fine from search pov, semantically might arguably be weird, but then the web is weird so…"

Julius Lothar Meyer Google Doodle. Did you see the Google Doodle for the 190th birthday of Julius Lothar Meyer, the German chemist who pioneered the periodic table, not the SEO periodic table, but the periodic table of elements.

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