Product Listing Ads (PLA) will now feature product ratings, starting in late July, the announcement said:
We believe these ratings will help differentiate products across google.com and google.com/shopping and will help merchants drive more qualified traffic through Product Listing Ads. In initial tests, product ratings also helped increase click-through-rates of Product Listing Ads.
Landing page optimization continues to be a growing conundrum for many brands, especially when you throw social media communities into the mix. Community managers can create great little posts that entice and pique the curiosity of friends and fans.
We demonstrate every day that we can drive traffic from social media channels to brand sites, but those visitors tend to browse more than buy. We love them for browsing, but is there something we could do to get our browsing friends to commit?
Be honest, you have pockets of social media connections that do the very same thing. They love to engage with you in their favorite social media space. They come to visit your site often, but they browse a while, read a blog post, and wander off to the next shiny thing that attracts their attention.
Could the problem lie with where they land on the site when they come to visit? There often seems to be a disconnect between social media communication and website development. The same psychology that applies to crafting an engaging social media post should apply to the pages those posts lead to.
Social Media MindsetYour brand's social media audience is easily distracted. The more obvious you make the call to action, the more likely they are to take that action.
That simplicity doesn't change when you move them from their favorite social channel to your website. If you direct them to a page that is full of options and cool shiny things, they are more likely to browse and never make a decision.
If you want your social media friends and fans to watch a video, download a tool, or sign up for an email list, you have to make it super simple to do. That is the job of the landing page.
Landing Pages That Fit the ChannelEach social channel, whether it's Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, or Google
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Sign UpRSSEver wonder how much of your traffic was actual human visitors and how much of your traffic was really scrapers, bots, and other web spiders? Google Analytics will now help you discern just that.
On their official Google
Yelp is turning 10 years old, and has announced it has accumulated 57 million reviews filled to the brim with colloquialisms and verbal memes. It is dropping a new tool to explore all of those ideas and fads it calls "Trends." For all of its ideas and accomplishments, Yelp is still a niche website. The Trends tool is a new addition to their formula, but can it find an audience outside of their core power users?
Yelp Trends
In the past few weeks, Bing rolled out its site safety page, a place where searchers can better understand why Bing is indicating that a site may not be safe to visit.
In the past, a customer would click on a potentially dangerous search result and be presented with a warning cautioning them that visiting this site could be dangerous, but with no real context or background information. With the rollout of the Bing Site Safety Page, Bing users can now understand in more depth the reasons for the warning, and more technically savvy users can potentially make better informed decisions (e.g. disabling javascript and plugins before visiting the site, or providing the site owner a link to the BSSPpage as a point of reference when they encounter the warning.)
