Ted Ives says, “Welcome to the second installment in my series on SEM account management. If you’re an SEM account manager and you’ve kept yourself from getting fired (see Part 1: How to avoid getting fired), you now have the opportunity and the time to focus on making your campaigns run like a top. Smoothly running and decently performing SEM campaigns require getting three things right: tracking, targeting and a good user experience. If you can master these three areas, your campaigns will “deliver the goods” and get you conversions at a decent cost per acquisition (CPA), or sales... [...]

Nikki Gilliland says, “Do you know a sponsored Instagram post when you see one? According to a recent survey, a surprising proportion of consumers remain in the dark, with 77% unaware what the #sp hashtag stands for (‘sponsored’) and 48% even unsure what the #ad hashtag means. A lack of consumer understanding is not the only problem, of course. Confusion over how brands and influencers should label paid-for content remains a big issue. As a result, CAP (the Committee of Advertising Practice) has recently issued a fresh set of guidelines to help social influencers and brands stick to... [...]

Matt McGee says, “Good morning from day one of SMX West 2017! We’re in San Jose, Calif., where the opening keynote conversation is set to begin at 9 a.m. PT. Jason Douglas, PM Director for Actions on Google, will be talking about Google Assistant with Search Engine Land’s Chris Sherman and Greg Sterling. Douglas will be talking about the developer ecosystem that’s growing around Google Assistant, and specifically about “Actions” — Google’s term for tools and features that let brands, marketers, developers and others interact with users through Google Assistant. Think of Actions... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “A day after Matt Britton, Google’s EMEA head of operations, apologized for advertisers’ ads appearing adjacent to extremist content — after a stream of advertisers announced they were puling ad from Google’s ad networks — the internet giant’s chief business officer announced new brand safety controls. As Marketing Land has reported, the Google Display Network includes many extremist sites propagating right- and left-wing ideologies, hoaxes and misinformation. The company updated its policies to address mirepresentative sites in November but did not address... [...]

Adam Dorfman says, “A year ago, I wrote in Search Engine Land about how Google is making entities smarter. Since that time, entities have become more important to Google — which means they are more important to businesses that want to be found on Google. It’s time for brands to get better acquainted with entities and why they matter. What are entities, and how have they shaped Google search? An entity, as defined by Google in a recent patent, is: [a] thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable. For example, an entity may be a person, place, item, idea,... [...]

Daniel Gilbert says, “In case you haven’t heard, Google has decided to ignore function words and word order for exact match keywords. If you just want to know how to fix this travesty, then scroll to the stopgap solution section where I’m sharing a script from Brainlabs (my employer) which will automatically add so-called “close variants” as negative keywords. Yippee! If you also want to hear me rant about Google’s astonishingly stoopid behavior, then read on… Rant A few years ago (2014), Google eliminated advertisers’ ability to exclude close variants as part of “exact... [...]

Antony Maina says, “Over the years, there has been so much debate about how links, both outbound and inbound, can affect a website’s Google ranking. So it’s not surprising that recently another question has been making the rounds. What’s the SEO Impact of Linking to Wikipedia Pages? Recently, Jon Tromans, a Twitter user, asked webmaster trends analyst at Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) John Mueller whether websites can be penalized for linking to Wikipedia, the well-known online, community edited encyclopedia. While some people might not think that Troman’s concern is a valid one, remember... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “In the good old days, “exact” meant exact. Then things got fuzzier. Now they’re about to get downright blurry. On Friday afternoon, Google announced another change to the way exact match targeting works in AdWords. Matching for close variants — plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs and so on —  will be broadened to include variations in word order and function words in the coming months. With this change, Google may ignore word order and function words when determining whether an ad should trigger for an exact match keyword. Google introduced close variants... [...]

Chuck Moran says, “Influencer marketing is one of the most exciting marketing tactics brands are using today, uniting branded content development with the amplification power of networked social media audiences, within or outside of the social networks themselves. The parallels with PR abound — content married to the distributive power of media/social platforms, and the challenge of measuring the organic impact of an earned media placement. As marketers wade into the burgeoning space of influencer marketing, they should keep in mind what the PR industry has learned when it comes to measurement. To... [...]

Patrick Kulp says, “Ads sold through Google have turned up in some pretty horrific corners of the web lately, and many big advertisers are outraged. The search giant responded to the growing uproar among its client brands on Friday with an unusual public apology and a promise to “do a better job.” “We’ve heard from our advertisers and agencies loud and clear that we can provide simpler, more robust ways to stop their ads from showing against controversial content,” Google U.K. managing director Ronan Harris wrote in a blog post. Google is the biggest advertising... [...]