SEO Wash-up Monday 16th March

Google

Google Ads switches to standard delivery for all campaign types – They have announced that they will be switching all campaigns, not just search campaigns or even shopping campaigns but also display, video, as well as hotel campaigns to standard delivery. This is expected to start happening next month and they say that any campaign using accelerated delivery will be switched over the following month.

Although they have dropped accelerated delivery last year September for Search campaigns and Shopping campaigns, it seems now Google is going all in with Standard delivery as they are replacing and removing the accelerated option for all campaign types.

Exported Google analytics conversion data will be enabled for bidding – There has been confusion over the new update by some thinking ‘Google by default will export the data from Google Analytics and bring it into Google Ads’. This is actually untrue.

The update does not mean that they will now automatically import Google Analytics conversion actions into Google Ads. It means that any conversion actions you’ve defined in Google Analytics and decided to import into Google Ads will now automatically be set for inclusion in smart bidding strategies on Google Ads.

This is an important difference to make, as this doesn’t mean that if you have one conversion action for form fills and another conversion action for time on page in Google Analytics that both of these conversion actions will now be used in Google Ads smart bidding strategies by default.

Google my business warns unpublished business profile will be deleted – Google begun sending out email notices to users of Google my business that their unpublished business profiles will be deleted within 30 days. Although most of the time this may be fine but if you do not want your unpublished listing to be deleted, then you must verify the listing within 30 days.

Google fixes search console verification – There was a bug with the method of verifying your web site or property within Google Search Console through Google tag manager. It seems that this has now been fixed according to Google and those who had issues might need to now re-verify their properties now.

Bing Updates

Microsoft advertising ads label blends in with organic search – There has been chatter and screenshots on social media that the Microsoft advertising labels in the Bing search results are very hard to notice as well. Those ads use to be way more visible, now there is this tiny “ad” label, in small font, in a tiny box outline.

Bing offline for several hours on Windows 10 search – The built-in Windows search went down for many its users for more than three hours. The Windows search that is built into Microsoft’s latest Windows 10 operating system started to show blank search results for apps or any other search queries. It uses the Bing backend to search for results across the web, and it appears that this was the source of the issue.