The Real Google Assistant Opportunity

At Google's Developer Conference this week it was announced that Google Assistant will be able to make appointments for people over the phone for things like reserving seats at a restaurant or making an appointment for a haircut. The real opportunity, however, may be for businesses to take advantage of this technology.

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If you’ve yet to get used to the new look and functionality of AdWords, it's high time you get acquainted.

Google is still updating the new AdWords interface with features only available in the old one but says the old version will be phased out by the end of this year.

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Just launched, the Microsoft Audience Network (MAN) is a new display ad network that allows Bing Ads advertisers to target Office365 subscribers along with Windows, LinkedIn, Outlook, and Skype.

Ads will be shown on Microsoft properties including MSN, Outlook.com, the Edge web browser and as yet undisclosed third-party properties.

MAN is initially available only in the US, UK, Canada and Australia

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Images on webpages can have a big impact on user engagement — nobody wants to see great walls of text. However, it’s essential images are used correctly - especially when it comes to mobile.

Google provides some useful tips in their image publishing guide which has just been updated. These tips can help your images rank better and bring more traffic to your website.

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A new report from digital agency Merkle highlights stunning growth in AdWords’ shopping ads in the US market, where over 60% of paid search clicks are now from shopping ads.

That’s up from 25% of paid search clicks three years ago, and up from 55% in Q4 2017.

Shopping ad spend, naturally, has also risen by over 40% since Q1 2017. And shopping ads now account for 82% of all non-brand paid search clicks for retailers.

While shopping ads have yet to take off in the NZ market, we think it’s only a matter of time.

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