Welcome to today’s top news in SEO and search. Here’s what’s happened over the weekend and yesterday (sorry folks – spent yesterday catching up after Conversion Conference).
Google Introduces New Analytics Layout
Google announced last week that they’re introducing some improvements to the analytics dashboard. Changes include a new home (seen above) which will offer overviews of “key aspects of your business” selected based on how you’ve configured analytics as well as a new discover page to introduce you to the all the new introductions. These changes are rolling out over the next few weeks globally.
How Facebook’s News Feed Works
Andrew Hutchison wrote an interesting summary of Facebook’s VP of News Feeds Adam Mosseri’s session from the F8 Conference for Social Media Today. In the session Mosseri explained the signals Facebook looks at to determine the relevancy of a news item from how interesting an item may be to you to your likelihood to engage with it and a bunch more. I’m not even going to try to Cliff Notes this one as Andrew provides a ton of images that serve the story well so if you’re involved in Facebook marketing in any way you’ll definitely want to read this. If you’d like to watch his full session here it is:
Google Wants Your Blood
TechCrunch reported on the story of Alphabet’s life sciences division Verily’s public pitch to get the buy-in of 10,000 Americans to give up their health records and submitting to one-to-two days of health testing once per year for the four year duration of the study. This is being done in conjunction with Duke, Stanford and Google themselves with a goal of mapping the baseline of health in apparently in hopes of spurring on the next generation of medical discovery. To me it seems a little bit creepy but what do I know?
New Features For Bing Shopping Campaigns
Ginny Marvin covered the announcement on Bing’s blog for Search Engine Land of some new features Bing is rolling out in their feed. They’ve just added search terms reports at the product level, inventory update feeds that users can upload manually or via FTP and also setup a schedule for Bing to download automatic feeds.LinkedIn Launches Matched Audiences
Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Journal reported on the announcement by LinkedIn that they’ve launched matched audiences across all campaign types. The new features will allow advertisers to target people who have visited their website, targeting via email lists (you can upload lists containing up to 30,000 emails) and account targeting which allows you to up to 300,000 companies.
Google Translating Reviews To Your Language
Matt Southern covered a very handy change in how Google handles reviews for Search Engine Journal. Google is now automatically translating reviews into your native language. To access this feature you simply need to update to the latest version of your Google Maps and Search apps. Here’s what it looks like:
Google Selling TV Ads
Anthony Ha over at TechCrunch covered the news that through DoubleClick Google is now in the TV advertising space. Advertisers can access this via the DoubleClick Bid Manager and purchase ad space either nationally or locally on Wideorbit, Clypd and Google Fiber. I assume they’re be expending their network reach in the near future. These ads will be tied to the DoubleClick online measurement system allowing advertisers to determine if their ads produced higher branded queries and drove more Google and YouTube traffic.
Ranking On Local Search
Bill Hartzer wrote a great piece over on Search Engine Journal outlining 52 points you need to consider/deal with if you want to rank locally. It’s a great go-to list including everything from getting your NAP in shape to the importance of reviews and also covers the various ways to get this all done. If you care about your local rankings at all this is highly recommended reading from a guy who knows what he’s talking about.
Get A Free Ride In A Self-Driving Car
As reported by CNBC, Google is giving our free rides in the Phoenix area in their self-driving cars. The effort is to get feedback from riders on the experience to aid Google in understanding the experience and perhaps reluctance of drivers. If you’re in the Phoenix area you can apply to be an early rider at https://waymo.com/apply/. I know I’d have done it already if I lived there. Here’s their pitch …
Google Launching $17,000 Camera
Google has announced the launch of a new VR camera but by Chinese camera company YI and called the Halo. It shoots in 4k video across 17 cameras simultaneously and then stitches the images together using Google’s Jump software to create the immersive 3D feel we’re all looking for. If you think $17,000 is a lot of money it is BUT that’s half the price that CD writers launched in 1990. They dropped down to under $1000 two years later and I could now grab one free at almost any electronics drop-off location.
That’s it for today. If you think we missed any top stories please feel free to add them in the comments below.