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Google machine learning responsive search ads

Google Responsive Search ads are here

Want to spend less time creating and running ad campaigns, and more time enjoying the results? Google has you covered if you take at face value Thursday’s Google Marketing Live announcements.

With responsive search ads, now in limited invitation-only beta, you give Google up to 15 titles and four ad descriptions. Then hand over the car keys, and leave it to Google to mix and match your creative to the search query.

But wait, there’s more: you can get three headlines, not two; and 90 characters for your ad description (not the normal 80).

We’re keen to test this, but we hope that Google does a better job than with responsive display.

Also announced: YouTube campaigns get a new Maximize Lift Smart Bidding strategy; and Local campaigns, a new Google Ads campaign type intended to drive store visits. Oh, and store visits and new customers have been added as goals to the recently announced Smart Shopping Campaigns.

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Speed up landing pages to improve your AdWords performance

Google points out that even the best ads struggle to deliver results if they’re sending people to slow landing pages, especially on mobile.

According to Google, for every one-second delay in page load time, retail conversions can fall by up to 20%.

So in response, Google has just announced a new tool to help AdWords advertisers diagnose and improve their mobile site speed. Google's new mobile speed score evaluates advertisers' landing pages on a 10-point scale, with 1 being very slow and 10 being extremely fast.

You can see your mobile speed score on the Landing Pages section in your Google AdWords account and it looks like below.

More details here...

AdWords mobile speed score

Google Posts add ‘Call Now’ button

Google My Business has added the ability for businesses to add a “call now” button as the call-to-action in Google Posts. This new option defaults to the primary phone number set in Google My Business, so it currently doesn’t allow you to use a unique tracking number.

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The Year in Search 2017


Google has released a 2 minute video which highlights major search query trends last year. Not surprisingly, a bit US-centric, but worth watching & a reminder of how tough 2017 was for many in the world.


Facebook receives maximum UK privacy fine

Facebook has received a massive £500,000 fine in the UK resulting from the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal. The fine was imposed, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), because Facebook failed to properly safeguard user information from third-party exploitation or be transparent about how personal data was potentially being used.

The fine, whilst massive, is less than 10 minutes worth of revenue for Facebook and could have been much worse. Under the new GDPR rules, the fine could have been up to 4% of Facebook's revenue. In otherwords, billions of dollars...

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About the Author SureFire

These search marketing news updates feature articles of interest picked up through the week by the SureFire team.

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