Example 1 – Drug Rehabilitation Centers

The drug rehab industry is a confusing and a unregulated market. A fluctuation of rehab facilities owned by investor firms is causing a stir with insurance companies — resulting in massive costs for online advertising. Meanwhile, Google’s most recent regulations for paid advertising in this competitive market has weakened many of the “certified facilities”, rendering them unable to make sufficient changes needed to overcome these issues.

After seeing an abundance of deceptive and misleading ads for unregulated drug rehab services, Google and Facebook now require mandatory “certification” for any drug rehab that wishes to participate in any form of paid advertising services within their platforms.

Even though these certifications are approved and vetted by the National Association of Addiction and Treatment Providers and the National Center of Addiction and Substance Abuse, the cost for certification is steep.

Following is a screenshot from LegitScripts, a third party vetting these certifications.

This week, Google announced two new ad formats for retail and brand advertisers ahead of the holiday shopping season that deliver shopping experiences on third-party sites, in Google Image search and in Google Search.

Add video in Showcase Shopping ads

Now, Google is rolling out another space for retail and brand marketers to extend the footprint of their video assets.  This time in Search with videos in Showcase Shopping ads.

Showcase ads are the multi-image Shopping format that Google rolled out last year. When users click on the ads, they go to a Google-hosted landing page that features promotions, descriptions and select products from the advertiser’s product feed. They typically display on brand and broad queries.

Videos are displayed in the featured image position. After clicking on the ad, the video plays in full at the top of the Google-hosted landing page that features a selection of products from the advertiser’s product feed.

Google touts Showcase Shopping ads as a vehicle for attracting new customers and should be thought of as top-of-funnel consideration formats. The top Showcase slot drives 3.6X higher than average CTR, and Showcase receives 20 percent more conversion credit with first-click attribution, according to Google.

The option is currently available to advertisers already running Showcase Shopping ads.

Google once again has disrupted the search marketing community by announcing exact match close variants will now include same-meaning variations. As a result, marketers putting all their chips into exact match keywords will have to shift their bidding, structure and keyword strategies to avoid wasted spend. The writing has been on the wall since 2014, and while the motive and benefactors are debated, the importance of focusing on intent rather than granular, exact keyword sets is clear.

Revisiting your keyword research approach and tactics is not only a suggested regular optimization task but also an essential step in preparation for match type changes rolling out in October. The process of keyword research is already changing, as it’s no longer necessary to launch with a hefty keyword list full of variations.

Rather, keyword research has become iterative and more valuable post-launch as needed. Following are some pertinent points of consideration when conducting keyword research for more effective spend and results.

Reviewing your PPC structures

For pay-per-click (PPC) practitioners, exact match becoming less important can seem discouraging. It can also bring challenges surrounding intent in B2B spaces. The new reality is that as Google improves its machine learning, marketers must adapt by combining keyword sculpting and research with many other available corresponding intent-centric signals. Think demographics, site engagement or browser history, location or proximity, time of day, income targeting and so on.

First and foremost, you should review performance within accounts and revisit your management approach. If accounts contain predominantly exact match, look to understand how close variant changes could affect performance or intent based on:

• Keyword order.
• Multiple-word keywords.
• Addition of a location or preposition within a keyword.
• Synonyms, close or similar-word variants.

Findings and responses will inherently dust off the topic of how the current campaign structure strategy aligns with performance and match type deviations. Remember, Google’s optimization levers work best when sufficient data is flowing through.

Don’t fret over giving Google the full reign over an account. Instead, focus on how consolidation (paired with “safety nets”) could bring benefits to the overall program. Single keyword ad groups (SKAGs) are powerful for personalization, granularity and quality scores, but be careful the contextual changes haven’t made you compete against yourself.

Google has told CNBC that “there is very little search personalization” going on in the Google search results ranking right now and that the personalization that is currently used is limited to “user’s location or immediate context from a prior search.”

Fading fast: Personalized search for search rankings was a big deal several years ago, but now you barely see cases of it in the search results. You do see it in other Google products, but not too much in core web search. Google said that after a lot of testing around personalization, they found it didn’t really help searchers find the content they are looking for and it very rarely helped improve search results.

Pandu Nayak, who leads ranking at Google, said, “A query a user comes with usually has so much context that the opportunity for personalization is just very limited.”

What happened? The last time Google wrote a detailed case on how they use personalization in search was in 2011. And in 2012, it started getting a bad rep, and competitors like DuckDuckGo used it as ammo against Google.

CNBC has pointed out that Google’s step back on personalization has helped them stay out of some of the controversy that sites like Facebook or Twitter have seen with their news feed algorithms.

Why should SEOs care? Many SEOs track search results, and without much personalization taking place, it might make it easier for SEOs to report on their ranking success or failures. Of course, localization is a heavy factor, and that plays a role in ranking. Google Search Console does provide ranking reports, as do many other tools.