🔍 Foursquare becomes the first MRC-accredited location data provider

Aug 24, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, it's Monday, August 24th, in case you needed a reminder, and on this day in 2015, for the first time, 1 billion people logged into Facebook in a single day. At the time, that was roughly one in seven people on earth.

A whole new world for mobile location data. As third-party cookies go by the wayside, marketers will have to look elsewhere for audience data. Mobile location data can help us understand customer behavior, purchase intent, brand affinity and be used as a targeting tool, but its quality and accuracy have been a point of contention. To bring order to the chaos and establish industry standards, the Media Rating Council (MRC) issued Location-Based Advertising Measurement Guidelines in 2017.

Now, nearly three years after its introduction, Foursquare has become the first MRC-accredited location intelligence company. Many of the company's competitors may also be contemplating or pursuing MRC accreditation, as it's likely to become a must-have certification to partner with large agencies, and the fact that only Foursquare has it is a significant competitive advantage, at least for the time being.

Prioritizing SEO as a developer. An institutional focus on SEO and understanding of the technologies that power your website can help you overcome (or outright avoid) the organizational pitfalls that hamper many businesses' organic visibility. "[Developers] want to sharpen their knowledge of the latest, greatest thing for employability," writes Detlef Johnson, Search Engine Land's SEO for developers expert, cautioning developers to avoid using React to hammer away at every task and instead opt for jQuery or vanilla JavaScript when those are more appropriate. During our first SEO for Developers session of Live with Search Engine Land, ZenSEM's Anthony Muller shared an anecdote about how unwarranted technology preferences resulted in tanking rankings and revenue.

SEOs working with sizable development teams might be inspired by Southern New Hampshire University's Katie Meurin, who shared how she was able to cut through opaque ticketing processes and get her developer counterparts to ask questions about how the changes they were considering might impact their site's SEO and even use SEO tools to check on Lighthouse and Web Vitals scores. You can read more of Detlef's takeaways from the session here.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Social Shorts

YouTube Ads Leaderboard: TrueView for Action

Last week, YouTube published a list of top-ranking direct-response ads on the YouTube Ads Leaderboard. The list features the top TrueView for Action ads that ran to date in 2020 across the U.S.

"TrueView for action ads have clickable elements that give viewers the ability to take direct action while watching a video ad," the company wrote on a Google blog. "Since launching this format, many brands have built creative to earn attention and drive engagements, like clicks and conversions. These were the top ads determined by an algorithm that factors engagements with the features of the format: total reach and clicks."

Here's a look at the top three ads:

Dr. Squash Soap: Save Your Skin With Dr. Squatch Soap
Honey: How much can you save with Honey? Let's find out.
Sprint: Get the GS10+

Read more »

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Search Shorts

Google Search Console works with Squarespace

Squarespace Search Console data. Google announced that Squarespace now can show Search Console data. Google wrote "If you're a Squarespace user, you can now see how people found each of your pages in Search Raising hands Find queries, clicks, and impressions at page level in the updated Search Keywords Panel."

Canonization signals. John Mueller of Google listed out some of the signals Google uses to determine the canonical URL, they include "redirects, Internal, external links, sitemaps, hreflang, canonicals, cleaner URLs, etc."

Swapping out 404s. "Sometimes our systems are so used to a URL not "working" (noindex, 404, etc) that it can take a bit of time to get back, so swapping out the URL can certainly help. In most cases you wouldn't need to though," John Mueller of Google said.

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