🔍 Local Stores Cards, "nearby" filtering in Shopping and more

Sep 17, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, BOPIS is poised to play a big role this holiday season,

Buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) is taking off amid the pandemic — it grew more than 250% YoY in August, according to Adobe. Ahead of the holiday season, Google is adding features to attract product seekers by promoting more local offline buying options — and give it an edge over Amazon.

The features for retailers include a new local stores card with info from Google My Business, a more prominent "nearby" filter on the Shopping tab and greater visibility for the "curbside" and "in-store pickup" Labels on local Inventory Ads. Be sure to get your GMB and merchant feeds in order now.

How much does Google's new search term filtering affect ad spend transparency? Fred Vallaeys and his team wrote a script to help you see the impact in your own accounts. In one account, Fred found the extra filtering Google added this month limits visibility into the search terms responsible for nearly half of its ad spend.

NEARLY HALF?! That means this account has lost the ability to act on or optimize all of that ad spend. There's no way to keep a check or at least watchful eye on how Google's machine learning algorithms treated that spend. We're just supposed to trust. Do you?

Keep reading for your daily Search Shorts and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Social Shorts

Celebs sit out Facebook and Instagram. And?

The Kim Kardashian effect has come to the Stop Hate for Profit campaign against Facebook. The reality star announced she was joining the 24-hour celebrity-driven sit-out. She put out a call to her followers to join her in freezing their Instagram and Facebook accounts for the day Wednesday, saying, "… I can't sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation – created by groups to sow division and split America apart…." Dozens of other celebrities participated in the Instagram Freeze.

Why we care. The July advertiser boycott this summer had limited impact on Facebook's business or practices. Despite ample press and a stock drop yesterday that likely had more to do with news of a possible antitrust suit in the U.S., the overall effect of this short boycott will be but a minor blip for the company. As of mid-afternoon ET yesterday, there were just 12.4K posts using #StopHateForProfit on Instagram and 26K people posting about it on Facebook.

What is product information management (PIM) and why is it such a hot topic in both B2B and B2C commerce?

The ability to leverage PIM to deliver engaging product experiences and to be able to rapidly adapt is *key* in order to scale and grow. Join this webinar and learn how the current landscape has led to rapid digital transformation for online retailers to manage product information. Learn how to deliver the most relevant product content to your customers –at the right time, in the right place –and build compelling product experiences that fuel great customer experiences.

RSVP here »

Search Shorts

Google search ranking update on September 15th?

Google search ranking fluctuations. So the tracking tools that track the Google search fluctuations all spiked around September 15th and 16th but overall the SEO community chatter around this update has been quiet. And no, Google has not confirmed an update.

Measure site speed. Google's John Mueller said it is complex and sometimes confusing when you try to measure the speed of your web pages. But Google does focus on the Core Web Vitals and maybe you should also?

Hack and ranking help. A site seems to have been hacked and it caused the Google rankings of that site to drop. Google's John Mueller went back and forth on Twitter to help this webmaster fix the site.