SEO Wash-up Monday 16th April

Waze rolls out ads that are aimed primarily at small businesses

The company Waze is rolling out map based ads which are aimed primarily at small businesses called Waze Local. Waze local is designed to be simple to buy and set up, it features three ad units:

• Branded Pin – this offers additional information when it’s clicked
• Promoted Search – this gives priority rankings to advertisers in a search context similarly to Google Adwords
• Zero-Speed Takeover – this is a banner that only appears during traffic stops

It is said that during the beta period, Waze advertisers saw 20.4% more monthly navigations when they started advertising with Waze Local. Within the Waze Local feature, there are three primary offerings with different pricing for the segments:

• Starter – this is for businesses with fewer than 10 locations. Businesses can pay $2 per day or more
• Plus – this is for businesses with up to 50 locations and offers live support. Businesses can pay roughly $100 per day at a minimum
• Enterprise – this is for companies with more than 50 locations.

The initial setup takes under five minutes and will report as follows:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Navigations
• Call and URL information
• Info Button clicks

Any business that is a Plus member will get additional metrics and reporting.

At the moment the Waze local is not tied into any other Google advertising product and is sold directly from Waze. Though there is a small number of resellers who are operating in the market, it is said that there may be more in the future as it currently has over 100 million active users and that on average, their users spend 11 hours per month in the app.

Google has rolled out its more results search button on mobile

Google has officially rolled out its “More results” search button on mobile, which makes it possible for additional search results to load beyond the first set of results displayed. The new more results button will replace the previous next button that would display a new page of mobile search results.

The new more results button has been designed to load more organic results first before loading relevant ads under the organic results. This will appear for searchers using the Google app on Android and major mobile browsers. However, for the iOS, Google says the support for Chrome on iOS is yet to come.