🔍 Invisible Google search terms. Visible LinkedIn followers.

Sep 04, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, first, shout it loud.

Your praises, that is. Today is the last day to enter the 2020 Search Engine Land Awards. Show off your SEO and SEM campaign skills or nominate that deserving someone on your team for Search Marketer of the Year. Learn about the categories and enter here. And check out last year's honorees.

In my frustration yesterday about Google's decision to limit search terms reporting (I've got more to say on that next), I skipped noting that LinkedIn has rolled out some updates for Page owners. Now, instead of just an aggregated number and demographics, you can see a list of your LinkedIn Page followers and sort them by current company, industry and location. That data can help you understand more about your audience on the platform and the kinds of content that is likely to resonate with them.

Back to Google. Google isn't answering any more of our questions about the change to search terms reporting. A day in, it seems clear now that we're looking at millions, if not billions, of longtail Search ad spend becoming invisible to advertisers. Initial calculations by the folks at Seer Interactive, for example, found that Google's search term update "hides search terms for ~28% of paid search budgets and removes search term visibility of 20.4% of PPC clicks."

And this comes just as we head into the critical fourth quarter. In a pandemic.

We'll be thinking about this more over the holiday weekend. To our U.S. readers, enjoy the Labor Day weekend,

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

New product deep-dive: Image extensions on Search

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Search Shorts

Toxic domains, can they hurt you?

Toxic domains. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter "we don't have a concept of toxic domains." But I do suspect some domains won't help you rank much in Google.

Bing Webmaster Tools bug. The other day, Bing Webmaster Tools had issues with logging in and showing the right domain names to the user. This has now been resolved.

Math help. Check out the Microsoft Math Extension in Teams, powered by Bing, it looks pretty cool.

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Social Shorts

Facebook won't take new political ads after Oct 27, but...

There were many headlines yesterday about Facebook's decision to stop accepting new political ads a week before election day in the U.S. "New" being the operative word.

From Casey Newton at The Verge: "Candidates and political action committees will continue to be able to buy ads that have already received at least one impression by October 27th, the company said. They can also choose to target those existing ads at different groups or adjust their level of spending. But they won't be able to launch new creative campaigns — a hedge against candidates spreading misinformation during a particularly fraught moment in the company's history."

Why we care. The decision is part of a set of steps "to protect against election interference," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Given the Oct. 27 deadline, we can expect political groups will be scurrying to upload new ads on Oct. 25 and 26. A reminder that Facebook doesn't fact-check political ads. It did say "it would expand its policies against voter suppression to include 'implicit misrepresentations' about the process, even if they don't discourage voting." Coming off July's Facebook Ads boycott, it's likely brand safety will be on the minds of many brand advertisers in the weeks leading up to the election.

Enter the 2020 Search Engine Land Awards before TONIGHT at midnight!

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