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News from Episode 306

By Site Strategics
March 18, 2019

Site Strategics CEO Erin Sparks and Digital Media Director Tom Brodbeck kicked off the latest episode of their award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast with recent digital marketing news. Episode 306 featured special guest special guest Brad Geddes, PPC expert and co-founder of Adalysis, who helped provide commentary and analysis on the week’s news:

Google Ads to Sunset Average Position Reporting Metric Later this Year

From Ginny Marvin on Search Engine Land we saw this headline: Google Ads to sunset average position reporting metric later this year.

  • Tom Brodbeck: The article notes that although average position is going away as a metric, they’re adding four new metrics. Impressions (absolute top)% shows the percentage of impressions your ad received when it appeared as the first ad at the top of the search results page above all the organic results, Impressions (top)% shows the percentage of impressions your ad received when it appeared anywhere in the top of the page above organic results, Search (absolute top) IS shows the impressions you’ve received in the absolute top location above the organic results divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location, and Search (top) IS shows the impressions you’ve received in the top locations above the organic search results compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
  • Brad Geddes: The new metrics are going to be more precise for understanding visibility, but you’re not going have data on these new metrics going back a year, and when the average position metric goes away, then everyone is losing their year-over-year trend data that they use to project their information. Unless you’re going to do huge data dumps to preserve the information. The other downside is we’re losing the simplicity of the average position metric. When you tell a company that their average position is 1 versus 2, they easily understand that. But when you say something like “Your average absolute top impressions share is 32% and your top impressions share is 74%” most companies will have no idea what you’re talking about. We’re losing the simplicity.
  • Erin Sparks: the average position metric was great because it was an easily understood metric or reference point where you could look at it and say our various ad strategies got us to this average position. It was an easy way to quickly judge the effectiveness of your campaigns.
  • Brad Geddes: Yes, and now with the new metrics you really have to step back and ponder what in the world each one means. Losing the simplicity is unfortunate. Google is trying to get us to think not so much in terms of position as visibility. The new metrics are about how visible you are – absolute top of page vs top of page vs somewhere on a seach page but not the top, etc.

Google Shopping Ads to Automatically Appear in Google Images

As reported by Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, it looks like Google Shopping Ads will Automatically Appear in Google Images.

  • Erin Sparks: This placement of shoppable ads in Google Image is going to happen automatically for anyone with a Google Ads account who is running shoppable ads, whereas previously you had to manually opt-in to the Search Partner Network.
  • Brad Geddes: This is a good change. It makes sense. In fact, it makes you wonder why it didn’t happen three years ago. It feels like Google is a bit late to their own party. No downsides to this one. Well, actually there can be a downside. People who aren’t in shopping mode can easily end up clicking on these images because they’re interested in seeing the image but they didn’t realize it was an ad. Advertisers can get some really high click-through rates, but a bunch of them might be people clicking on the image to look at the image, not to shop, and they didn’t even know it was an ad. And while on the website traffic side Google has metrics that tell you how much of your traffic is coming from regular Google versus Google Image, the same does not exist on the advertising side. Google doesn’t make it easy to see where you ad clicks come from.
  • Tom Brodbeck: Google’s talking heads have been sending a clear message lately that SEO people need to pay more attention to images. This might just be the first move of several related to Google Image.

Google Ad Manager Adopting First Price Auctions for Programmatic Display, Video

And another one from Ginny Marvin but this time on Marketing Land, Google Ad Manager is adopting first price auctions for programmatic display and video.

  • Brad Geddes: This is a HUGE change, and Google is going to make a ton of money on it. In the previous second-price bidding model, let’s say someone is bidding 50 cents/click to be in position 2. You want to be in position one so you tell Google Ads you’re willing to a $1 per click to get there, but what you ended up actually paying was just a penny more than the second price, so you pay 51 cents/click. In a first-price model, all that’s gone. When you tell Google Ads the max you’re willing to pay, that’s essentially what you’re committing to. So, Google will end up raking in a lot more money in a first-price model than a second-price model. It’s just going to make everything much trickier for advertisers.

Connect with Brad Geddes

Twitter: @bgtheory (https://twitter.com/bgtheory)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ewhisper

Adalysis website: https://adalysis.com

Website: https://bgtheory.com

Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/Brad-Geddes/e/B0037A2UNK

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